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A HISTORY OF TAHITI 

A HISTORY OF FIJI 

PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE-AGE LINGERS 

THE MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 

THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 

JAVA, THE EXPLOITED ISLAND 






BY 
DR. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 



Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. LXXXVI, Nos. 2, 4, 5 and 
6, February, April, May, June, 1915; Vol. LXXXVII, Nos. 1, 3, July, September, 
1915; The Scientific Monthly, Vol. I, Nos. 1, 2, October, November, 1915; 
Vol. II, Nos. 1, 2, 4, January, February, April, 1916. 



[Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxxvi, No. 2, pp. 105- 

127, February, 1915. 



.M~55 A HISTORY OF TAHITI 



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O PY<:-- Br De. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

\ 1 CAENEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON 

YING- far to the southward of the paths of trade and exploration. 
Tahiti remained unknown until in 1767 Wallis saw its splendid 
peaks in the course of his voyage around the world in the English frigate 
Dolphin. It is true that Pedro Fernandez de Quires, a Portuguese cap- 
tain in the service of Spain, was credited with having discovered Tahiti 
on Pehruary 10, 1606, but the narrative of his voyage convinces one that 
the low-lying atoll upon which he landed, vainly seeking water, was 
probably Anaa, or possibly some other island of the Paumotos, for, like 
his predecessors, he sought the full favors of the tropic breeze and was 
borne to the northward of the most beautiful island groups of the 

Pacific.^ 

Even to-day, sad as she lies while her native race is dying, Tahiti 
epitomizes the*^ charm of Polynesia. The missionary Ellis gives us a 
vivid picture of his impressions as in 1817 he gazed for the first time 
upon the varied picturesque and beautiful scenery of this most enchanting is- 
land.2 We had beheld successively as vce sailed along its shore, all the diversity 
of hill and valley, broken or stupendous mountains and rocky precipices, clothed 
with every variety of verdure, from the moss of the jutting promontories on the 
-shore, to the deep and rich foliage of the breadfruit tree, the Oriental luxuriance 
of the tropical pandanus, or the waving plumes of the lofty and graceful cocoa- 
nut grove. The scene was enlivened by the waterfall on the mountain's side, 
the cataract which chafed along its rocky bed in the recesses of the ravine, or 
the stream that slowly wound its way through the fertile and cultivated valleys, 
the whole surrounded by the white-crested waters of the Pacific, rolling their 
waves of foam in splendid majesty upon the coral reefs, or dashing in spray 
against its broken shore. 

And in speaking of the Tahitian valleys, Ellis says : 

There is the wildness of romance about the deep and lonely glens, around 
which the mountains rise like the steep sides of a natural amphitheater, till the 
■clouds seem supported by them — ^this arrests the attention of the beholder, and 

1 See "The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, " 1595 to 1606, trans- 
lated and edited by Sir Clements Markham, Hakluyt Society Publications, Lon- 
don, 1904. 

2 See, "The Voyages of Pedro Fernandez de Quiros" 1595 to 1606, trans- 
lated and edited by Sir Clements Markham, London, 1904. Hakluyt Society 
Publications. 



-i>UL 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




Sunset Over Eimeo Seen feom the Siioiie of Tahiti. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 3 

for a time suspends his faculties in mute astonishment, and in the unbroken still- 
ness that pervades the whole we might easily have induced the delusion that we 
were upon the enchanted ground of nature 's fairy land. 

Even simple sailor-like Wallis says of Tahiti : 

VA^be. country has the most delightful and romantic appearance that can be 
imagiired; towards the sea it is level, and is covered with fruit trees of various 
kinds, particularly the eocoanut. Among these are the houses o£ the inhabitants, 
consisting only of a roof, and at a distance having greatly the appearance of a 
long barn. The country within, at about the distance of three miles, rises into 
lofty hillSj that are crowned with wood, and terminate in peaks from which 
large rivers are precipitated into the sea. We saw no shoals but found the is- 
land skirted by a reef of (coral) rocks through which there are several open- 
ings into deep water. 

Tahiti is situated in South Latitude 17° 40' and West Longitude 
149° 25'. In other words, upon the opposite side of the world from 
the middle of Africa, and nearly at the center of the Pacific Ocean. 
In outline, it is figure-8 shaped, being a twin island, consisting of two 
oval land masses joined by the low, narrow isthmus of Taravao. The 
major axis of the island extends from northwest to southeast, and is only 
about 37 miles long. The larger land mass, called Great Tahiti, or 
Tahiti-uni, has about four times the area of Little Tahiti (Tahiti-iti) 
which lies to the southeastward. The total length of the coast line is. 
not more than 120 miles, and the area of the whole island is only about 
one third that of the State of Ehode Island. 

The peculiar figure-8 shape of the island is probably due to the activ- 
ity of two originally separate volcanic cones each one of which rose 
above the sea until their sides touched. But, if this be true, it occurred 
long ago measured in terms of the life-time of volcanoes for there 
are now neither hot springs nor other evidences of internal heat upon 
the island. 

Indeed much of nature's sculpturing of valley-wall and peak is due 
to the great variety of plutonic and volcanic rocks and nepheline syenite 
upon Tahiti, the differing degrees of hardness of which permitted ero- 
sion to carve deeply in some places, while at the same time leaving 
others to stand in bold relief. 

Also the grandeur of Tahitian scenery is due to the fact that its 
volcanoes were of an explosive type and tore deep fissures into the earth's 
crust, permitting molten basalt to well upward and cement the rents. 
Then, when the volcanic fires died down, the rains consummated their 
work of washing away the softer rocks, leaving imposing pinnacles of 
hard basalt such as the sheer precipice Maiao, " The Diadem," at the 
head of Fautaua valley which lifts its unconquered crest thousands of 
feet above the soft corroding lavas of the lowlands. 

In other places the valleys are spanned by dykes of basalt forming 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




MOKEA Island Seen feom Tahiti after a Storm. 



precipices over which the mountain torrents dash in a mnltitiide of 
graceful cataracts. 

The seductive charm of Tahiti is all its own for everywhere the 
beautiful is wedded to the grand. The stern crags are but nestling 
places for the mosses of the forest, and fascinated by the s^dvan setting 
'of the waterfall where rainbows float on mists among the tree ferns; 
the roar of the cataract is unperceived; and the coral reefs and shaded 
shores of fair Tahiti, who can forget them — the glorious sparkle of sun- 
beams playing over flickering ripples in a riot of turquoise, emerald, and 
blue is the setting of every picture — the background of every memory. 
Indeed, it is not where the peaks are highest that Tahiti is loveliest 
for nowhere in the Pacific do the mountains meet the sea in fairer grace 
of form and color than at Tautira on the eastern coast of Tahiti-iti. 
The charmed memory of Tahiti lives only to die with the beholder. 

In the Hawaiian or the Tongan Islands, cup-shaped craters con- 
stantly remind one of the volcanic origin of the land, but the erosion 
due to ages of tropical showers has all but obliterated these in Tahiti al- 
though the broad concavity in the upper region of Papenoo valley may 
possibly mark the site of the great central crater of Tahiti-uni. 

Nestled under the southeastern rim of this crumbling crater lies the 
gem of Tahiti, the lovely lake Vaihiria, in a setting of wild bananas, 
guava, tree-ferns, and clambering pandanus, and shadowed by precipices 
towering 3,000 feet above the calm secluded waters. From afar the riv- 
ulets dash down until torn by the ragged walls they fade mostly into 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 5 

mist and cloud-like descend in silence to the region of the lake. Al- 
though only one third of a mile wide, the natives believed this little lake 
to be bottomless until our plumb line came to rest at a depth of 80 feet. 
There is, however, no visible outlet although huge eels glide among the 
water-weeds, and the mystery becomes cleared away when one goes down 
into Vaihiria valley where at the foot of a wall of broken rocks a cool 
clear stream rushes impetuously into the sunlight. In fact the little 
lake has been formed by a land-slide which has dammed the valley the 
upper part of which it now occupies. 

In every feature Tahiti shows the wear of rain and weather, but 
still the green summit of Orohena towers 7,300 feet above the level 
of the sea, and 22,000 feet above the floor of the surrounding ocean. 
Yet the rains have accomplished much, and the almost constant land- 
slides show they are effecting more in their persistent work of levelling 
the grand peaks: and now 150 valleys wind downward from the high- 
lands to the sea. 

One is never away from the murmur of rippling water, as the moun- 
tain streams splash among moss-covered boulders that have rolled from 
their ancient lodgment in the caiion sides. As Bougainville wrote, 
these Tahitian valleys are images of Paradise upon earth. The brooks 
glide through arches formed by the interlacing leaves of wild banana, 
the "Fei" of Tahiti, while great caladiums flourish in the ever-moist- 
ened soil, and the perfume of vanilla pervades the air. Banyans form 
intricate tangles of subaerial roots though the maze of which the 




EiMEo riiO.M Tahiti. 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




L.AKE Vaiiiiaria, Tahiti. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 7 

waters find their way, and a pretty little percli {Dules malo) which 
rises briskly to the fly disports itself within the swirling pools. Then, 
at last, the brook courses sluggish and spent to deposit the rich soil, 
the spoil of the mountain slopes, over the broad alluvial plain which 
fronts the sea. 

Here upon the gently sloping shore-plain are the groves of bread 
fruit, cocoanut palms, taro and Tahitian chestnut which siipported so 
dense a population in old days that Foster who accompanied Captain 
Cook upon his second voyage estimated their number at 150,000, al- 
though he was doubtless deceived by the crowding of the natives to the 
shore off which his ship lay anchored. Yet, certainly, in 1769 the vil- 
lages were not isolated one from another as in other parts of Polynesia, 
but a continuous line of houses clustered along the shore, and the politi- 
cal unit had become the district rather than the town. 

But to return to the history of Tahiti, it was on June 18, 1767, that 
Captain Wallis perceived the summits of its mountains rise above the 
sea. On the following morning as he approached the shore the tropic 
haze hid the island from his view, and when the rising sun dissipated the 
mist he was surprised to find himself surrounded by a fleet of canoes, 
many of them double, and 60 feet long, their carved bows curving up- 
ward high above the sea, and their pandanus-mat sails of lateen pattern. 
The more daring finally approached his ship, their commanders bearing 
clusters of banana leaves which they threw upon the deck, and a few of 
the more courageous natives were then induced to come on board. Pigs 
and chickens were recognized as familiar animals, but the sight of a goat 
so overcame them with fear that they leaped overboard and swam to their 

canoes. 

Wallis reassured them through gifts of nails and trinkets, but soon 
the knowledge of this vast wealth aroused the cupidity of the natives, 
and for days they attacked his vessel with stones hurled from slings. 
Finally, on the twenty-fourth of June, aboiit 2,000 natives in 300 large 
canoes" surrounded the ship, and when the high chief threw the crest of 
a palm tree into the air a general attack commenced. Wallis was forced 
to use his cannon, but observing that no fire came from his bows, the 
canoes with white war streamers flying from their sails pressed down 
upon him fore and aft, only to be shattered by renewed volleys. Yet so 
persistent were they that on Jime 26 the Dolphin was compelled to shell 
the shore, sending cannon shot among the houses in the palm groves be- 
fore the natives broke and fled in terror to the hills. Then after more 
than 50 canoes in the district had been destroyed a stillness the British 
described as peace fell upon the scene. 

The sullen silence was broken on July 11, when Purea^ the Chief ess 

3 The "Oberea" of Cook and Banks. 



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or Ariirahi of the district of Papara came on board and was courteously 
received by AYallis who presented her with a mirror and a gown, he being 
under the impression that she was the " Queen " of the Island. As a 
matter of fact, there was no head chief whose authority was recognized 
over all parts of Tahiti, and Purea was merely a guest of her kinsman 
the chief of the district of Matavai Bay in which the Dolphin lay at 
anchor. 

Greatly impressed by Purea's commanding presence and with the 
respect she inspired among the natives, Wallis returned the call on the 




A Tahiti AN Valley. 



following day, the natives carrying him upon their backs to the great 
council house, or Fare-hau of Matavai within which Purea was herself 
but a guest, although her actions appear to have been those which would 
better have graced a hostess. The house in Avhich this remarkable 
reception occurred Avas 327 feet long by 42 wide and was a shed of palm 
thatch, the roof being supported upon 92 posts arranged in three rows. 
The " Queen " and her maidens at once proceeded to massage Wallis and 
his officers and finally to dress them in native garments, thus reciiDrocat- 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 9 

ing his own charity in presenting her Avith a European gown. The 
proceedings were, however, marred by the alarming action of the sur- 
geon who suddenly removed his wig, causing the "ladies of the court" 
to flee in terror from the house. 

Purea, having recovered her composure, commanded her followers to 
present Wallis with great quantities of bread fruit and many pigs and 
believing her to be supreme over the entire Island he soon persuaded 
himself that she had ceded her realm to him. Accordingly he hoisted 
the British flag, saluted it with twenty-one guns, gave each of his men 
a drink of rum mixed Avith the water of a Tahitian brook and thus sol- 
emnly took possession under the name "King George the Third's 
Island." 

As a matter of fact, Purea was vainly endeavoring to induce Wallis 
to visit her own district Papara, hoping through the influence of her 
supernatural guest to augment her own authority, for the natives be- 
lieved his ship to be a floating island filled with vindictive demons who 
had control of thunder and lightning; but he understood not a word, and 
man-like assumed that her "inconsolable weeping" was due to admira- 
tion for himself and sorrow over his intended departure. Thus on July 
27 did this British .^neas depart from his Polynesian Dido never more 
to see Tahiti. 

Soon after Wallis's departure Louis Antoine de Bougainville inde- 
pendently discovered Tahiti. He was circumnavigating the globe, com- 
manding the French frigate La Boudeuse, and the transport L'Etoile, 
and his 200 men were worn with the sea, scurvy threatening. Happy 
indeed were the French when, on April 2, 1768, from a distance of fifty 
miles they saw the peak of Orohena, as Wallis had sighted it eight 
months previously. Favored by the southern trades, they sailed along 
the shore to anchor on April 6, oif Hitiaa ; there to remain for a respite 
of ten days. In his fascinating "Voyage autour du Monde" published 
in Paris in 1771, Bougainville devoted two chapters to "Taiti," or "La 
Nouvelle Cythere," as he officially named it, furnishing an impassioned 
theme for French philosophy. 

Bougainville was a keen and sympathetic observer and he made the 
most of his time from the moment Avhen on April 4 the canoes ventured 
out to his ships, their chiefs bearing clusters of banana leaves in token 
of friendship. A hospital was established on shore for the scurvy- 
ridden sailors, and most friendly intercourse was established between 
them and the natives, who doubtless profited by their experience with 
Wallis to refrain from offending the new visitors. Yet, according to 
Cook, an infliction worse than Wallis's cannon was turned upon the un- 
suspecting islanders, for the ravages of a virulent infection of syphilis 
followed closely upon the departure of the French. Corruption and 
death had entered never to leave the land, and the once gigantic race of 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




House of Vae Kehu, Chieftess of the Marquesas at Tae-o-hoe. 



old Tahiti was to wither in a lingering decline. Fair as Tahiti was and 
Paradise as the French regarded it, they were the first to curse it with 
that infliction which " civilization " has for centuries brought upon 
the "savage." Sad Tahiti, land of mountain mist, and murmuring 
stream, of coral reef and tropic j^alm, and smiling skies was to be hence- 
forth a pest-house for the simjole race that knew her for their home. 
From a native point of view the situation is well described in the 
"Memoirs of Ariitaimai" of the great Papara family of Tahiti; who 
says : 

For forty generations these people (the Polynesians) had been isolated in 
this ocean, as though they were in a modern sanatorium, protected from con- 
tact with new forms of disease, and living on vegetables and fish. The viru- 
lent diseases which had been developed among the struggling masses of Asia 
and Europe found a rich field for destruction when they were brought to the 
South Seas. 

For this perhaps the foreigners were not wholly responsible, although their 
civilization certainly was; but for the political misery the foreigner was 
wholly to blame, and for the social and moral degradation he was the active 
cause. No doubt the ancient society of Tahiti had plenty of vices, and was a 
sort of Paris in its refinedness of wickedness; but these had not prevented the 
islanders from leading as happy lives as had ever been known among men. 
They were like children in their morality and their thoughtlessness, but they 
flourished and multiplied. The European came and not only upset all their 
moral ideas, but also their whole political system. 

But to return to our narrative. Captain James Cook, upon the 
first of his famous voyages visited Tahiti in the man-of-war Endeavour, 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI n 

remaining in Matavai Bay from April until Jnly, 1769. Cook's mis- 
sion was to observe the transit of Venus, for which purpose as well as for 
geographical discovery, his expedition had been sent out at the instiga- 
tion of the Eoyal Society of London. Accompanying him were such 
men of science as Banks and Solander whose observations upon the 
island and its natives at a time when they were as yet unspoiled, have 
given us the classic account of a primitive Polynesian community, sup- 
plemented as it was in 1829 by the scholarly volumes of " Polynesian 
Eesearches" written by the great missionary William Ellis. 

At the time of Cook's visit, Tahiti was a characteristic Polynesian 
feudalism, the Ariirahi, or principal chiefs, being dependent for sus- 
tenance and political support upon the landed proprietors, the hue 
raatira. But in Tahiti as elsewhere in Polynesia, the supreme chiefs of 
districts were believed to have descended from God-like heroes of the 
myths, and their persons were held as sacred, thus greatly strengthening 
their position in time of political crises. 

In acknowledgment of their feudal position, the large landed pro- 
prietors or Arii called themselves " the stays of the mast " by " the mast," 
signifying the Ariirahi, and as elsewhere wherever feudalism has been 
the social order, the incessant rivalry between nobles had forced the 
common people to flock to the standards of the few who could best afford 
protection, and in consequence the Arii, or "baron," of a Tahitian 
valley might become more powerful in his own domain than was the 
Ariirahi over the district as a whole. Thus an unstable form of "lim- 
ited monarchv" was maintained in each district and to secure the suc- 




Pandaxus Tree on the Lagoon LJeacii uv Fakakava Atoll, Paumotus. 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




Native of the Society Isles in Tahiti. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 13 

cession from usurpation, the son of the high chief was granted the fam- 
ily title immediately upon birth, and his father who was the first to do 
him homage, was nominally at least reduced to the rank of a vassal. 
Before the missionaries came there was never a " king " whose authority 
was recognized over all Tahiti, but so great in outward form was the 
respect paid to the Ariirahi that people who passed their houses or came 
into their presence removed all clothing to the waist, an act of homage 
they paid also to the images of gods. The Ariirahi's feet might not 
touch the ground in any but his native district for all he trod upon 
became his own. Accordingly, when abroad he was carried upon the 
back of a retainer, and it was the boast of Pomare that he was greater 
than King George for he of Tahiti rode upon a man while the king of 
England was obliged to content himself with a horse. 

In their marital relations the Tahitians closely approached the prim- 
itive condition wherein all the women are the wives of all the men. 
The wife of every man was also the wife of his friend, and it is probable 
that a more licentious race never lived during historic times. As 
Cook's narrative states, topics which with us are avoided were the chief 
theme of conversation among the Tahitians. 

As elsewhere in Polynesia, rank descended through the mother and 
for the purpose of maintaining their exalted state, the great chiefs inter- 
married only among their own kindred, but such alliances Avere merely 
temporary, for after the birth of a legitimate heir, women of high rank 
consorted without scandal with endless paramours, although all their 
children of uncertain parentage were immediately put to death. In 
fact, infanticide was established not only as an accepted, but as a lauded 
institution in Tahiti; and according to Ellis two or three children 
constituted an unusually large family, and practically every woman had 
with her own hands murdered some of her own offspring, probably two 
thirds of the children born in Tahiti being thus disposed of immediately 
after birth. 

In the absence of fatal epidemics and with the ever-present danger 
of famine through over-jjopulation, such barbarous checks upon in- 
crease had grown to be considered virtuous, and furnished the tenets of 
the society of Areoi, said to have been established in remote times by 
the followers of two celibate gods who although they did not enjoin 
chastity upon their worshipers prohibited their rearing offspring. Thus 
these bacchanalians of the Pacific roamed singing and dancing, wel- 
comed everywhere as wits and entertainers; transient spirits flitting 
through the world each to die the last of his race on earth. Tkey 
constituted a large proportion of the population, for in Cook's narrative 
we read of a fleet of 70 canoes filled exclusively with Areoi. 

Cannibalism was unknown in Tahiti at the time of its discovery, yet 
here as elsewhere over the Pacific traces of its having been were there. 



14 



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A Tahitian Carrying Bunches of Wild Plantain " Fei." The man had come 
several miles down the mountain side bearing this enormous burden. 



for tradition stated that two mythical brothers, the Taheeai, were canni- 
bals but were finally killed through trickery by a Tahitian Hercules, 
greatly to the joy of all men then living. Also at the time of Cook's 
visit, the eye of the human sacrifice was placed within the lips of the 
high chief, and the original name of the late "Queen Pomare" was 
Aimata, " the eye eater." 

As Avith the Aztecs, these sacrifices appear to have become more 
numerous immediately succeeding the coming of the white man. Crim- 
inals, or slaves who were captives taken in war, were immolated in times 
of jmblic ceremony as upon the occasion of the inauguration of a 
new Ariirahi, but the common sacrifices were pigs whose bodies were 
left to decompose upon the altars as food for the gods who came in the 
form of carrion birds. 

As elsewhere in Polynesia, the worshiped beings were the spirits of 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 



15 



departed ancestors, for to the simple mind all things of nature are of his 
own kindred, the world was made by a man-like god for man and all 
things centered ronnd him. Thus the sun was a ghost that plunged 
beneath the sea at night, the moon was the sun's wife and the stars their 
children, and every waterfall, mountain peak and valley had its guardian 
or haunting nymph or good or evil spirit. The ceremonies associated 
with the worship of the ancestral spirits were usually conducted upon 
the roof-shaped heaps of stones called the marae which each Arii 
caused to be erected in his district, each of his retainers contributing 
two stones to the structure. Cook states that the marae of the high 
chiefs Amo* and Purea in the district of Papara was a prism with an 
oblong base 267 feet long, 187 feet wide and 44 feet high, having 
eleven steps or terraces broader at the sides than at the ends. The top was 
a ridge resembling the roof of a house and at its middle point stood 
the image of a bird carved in wood while near it lay the broken model of 
a fish cut in stone. The sight of this stupendous structure, and the 
statement that each person in the district had contributed two and only 
two stones may have caused Cook to form his exaggerated estimate of the 
population of Tahiti. Shapeless and sadly reduced by burning in a 
lime kiln, the marae of Papara now lies forgotten in the forest by the 




Making Fiee in Tahiti, by rubbing two dried sticks of the yellow hibiscus one 

against the other. 

4 Amo, the "Eamo" of Cook's narrative, was the sou of Tuiterai (God of 
the sky). 



i6 



THE I OPi'LAJ? rClEXCE I'OXTJILY 




Father and Daughtek, Bora Boka Island, Society Islands. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 17 

sea. Yet even to-day the ruins of about 40 maraes are still to be found 
upon Tahiti and Eimeo. 

Such, in brief, were the Tahitians, that race of giant men who came 
to welcome Cook with leafy boughs within their hands — tokens of peace 
and friendship. And a friendship real as any that can be formed be- 
tween the weak and the powerful grew up between the great English- 
man, whom they called "Toote," and these careless, light-hearted child- 
ren of the Islands of the Sea. It is of curious interest, however, to 
observe that intimate as Cook became with his Tahitian friends, he 
never learned the true name of the Island, his word " Otaheite " meaning 
" From Tahiti " ; Bougainville's " Taiti " especially as the " h " is softly 
sounded, being far nearer the correct representation of the name. 

Without attempting to minimize the barbarity of their customs, let 
us not permit ourselves to be over harsh in condemning the Tahitians. 
A primitive race cast far from their original home upon a small island 
remotely isolated; without iron or metals, or clay for pottery, and liv- 
ing in a warm seductive atmosphere that soothed ambition into som- 
nolency; it is much to their credit that Cook says of them that they 
were cheerful, generous, cordial, and brave, and Ellis states that theft 
and crime were of rare occurrence. Such indeed is the consensus of 
opinion among Europeans who, though not missionaries, lived among 
Poljmesian peoples during the days when they were unspoiled by con- 
tact with civilization. In Mariner's fascinating account of Tonga, and 
Melville's charming story of Typee in the Marquesas we find far more 
of praise than of condemnation. 

Let us remember that practically nothing of invention, art, litera- 
ture, science or constructive leadership has come from the untold 
millions of our own race who have been born and bred and spent their 
languid lives within the torrid heat. Great men such as Hamilton, the 
first Dumas, or Kipling have, it is true, been born in the West Indies or 
in India, but their education and achievements were attained in colder 
lands. The history of the British in India is replete with the tragedy of 
broken hearts, and every ship bound "homeward" bears its freight of 
exiled children whose fate it is to become strangers to their duty-loving 
parents. This uncounted toll of the dull, monotonous, never-ending 
heat, how different would history have been had our race been born to 
withstand its merciless suppression. 

Just as the first fruits of the renaissance were ripening in Spain, this 
vision of the Indies came like a mirage from afar to lure onward the 
ablest of her youth. Into regions unknown they went never to return, 
and they and their descendants were lost to intellectual Spain. Thus 
was her best blood wasted and the leaders who might have been were 
unborn. Spain depleted, drained of her strength, and with too few 
at home to win the great battle of liberty, withered under the fires of 



i8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

the inquisition. It was the tropic heat, the infection of the mosquito- 
hannted swamp, and the demoralizing contact with tropical populations 
that conquered Spain, not the fleets of the English, for it was years 
after the tragedy of her great Aramada that Spain's greatest things in 
art and literature appeared. 

Indeed, England herself narrowly escaped the same fate which would 
have been hers also had she succeeded in supplanting the Spaniard on 
the mainland of tropical America. Unable to accomplish this, she was 
perforce obliged to colonize in the neglected north, and the bleak shores 
that gave her first adventurers so inhospitable a welcome in time became 
centers of civilization, advancing her culture and her empire over 
the sea. 

Cook returned to Tahiti in 1773 and again for the last time in 1777, 
and then for eleven years the Island saw no European vessels until 
October, 1788, when the cry " Ephai ! ephai!!" (A ship, a ship!!) 
echoed along the rocky shores. It was the Bountij under Lieutenant 
William Bligh, E. K., and her mission was to gather young bread-fru.it 
trees in order to introduce this coveted plant into the British West 
Indies. 

Bligh, although a brave and efficient navigator, made himself odious 
to both his officers and his men, his conduct being that of an irritable, 
selfish, suspicious tyrant, and much as his men feared him, they hated 
him even more. 

Yet for nearly six months, during which the ship lay moored in 
Matavai Bay, there was solace for her crew in the wanton pleasures of 
the tropic isle, and when on the 4th of April, 1789, the anchor rose for 
the Bounty's last farewell, many a heart was aching under the sailor's 
blouse and many a dark-eyed maiden watched weeping from the shore. 

If Bligh's ugly temper had been trying in the past, it became even 
more annoying after he left Tahiti. On the 27th of April when off the 
Tongan Islands, he burst forth into a tirade of abuse, unjustly accusing 
his officers, and especially his first mate, Mr. Christian, of petty thefts 
of food. 

Throughout the night the BounUj lay upon a calm and glassy sea, 
her sails flapping to the long, low, ceaseless heave of the Pacific, and 
young Christian, burning under his wrongs, paced hotly on his watch 
while the ship and all on board lay sleeping. 

In the gray of the listless morning before the glaring eastern sun 
had shown upon the sea, his resolve was taken and the die of Britain's 
most noted mutiny was cast. Hastening to the forecastle his word was 
as a spark to gunpowder to the repressed spirits of the crew. Amid 
deep muttered cursings, the gun chest was torn apart, and Bligh awak- 
ened to be led upon deck, his hands tied behind his back. The ship was 
in dire disorder with mutineer sentinels standing before the cabin doors 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 19 

of such officers as might have come to their commander's aid, but obe- 
dient to young Cliristian's orders, the Bounty's launcli, a boat only 23 
feet long, was lowered, and Bligh and 18 of his men were forced over 
the side crowding the frail craft until the gunwale was but seven inches 
above the level of the sea. 

But mercy came to temper the fate of those who were to be sent 
adrift. A hundred and fifty j^ounds of bread, some water and some 
wine, a little pork, charts, a sextant, a compass, and a few cutlasses were 
thrown into the boat. Guns the mutineers refused, and then the com- 
mander and his faithful few were cast away. 

As if in exultation the Bounty awakened to the impulse of the morn- 
ing breeze and glided off upon tlie rippling sea while from the throats 
of her ruffian crew the cry arose "huzza for Otaheiti." As the cheer 
came over the waters, it brought to Bligh a sense of high resolve to 
make the best of the narrow chance for life and home that lay before 
him and his men. But Christian, the mutineer, they say stood moodily 
with folded arms, his eyes fixed upon the drifting boat which stood for 
all that remained of law and order on the wave. 

A gentleman by birth and training, he might have risen high, an 
honored servant of his country. Too late the villain cheer revealed to 
him the dark import of his vengeful act. An outcast he must be for- 
evermore. In a world apart from Europe he must live, and memories- 
of youth and home and friends of other days rose up to curse him as hfr 
sailed, archpirate as he was, into a life of wantonness and ruin. 

The volcanic peak of Tofoa, one of the Tongan Islands, rose dimly 
above the northern horizon and toward it Bligh and his men set oars 
and sail hoping to increase their scanty store of food and water. In this 
they were foiled for the natives seeing them helpless attacked them with 
stones, killing one and wounding all so that they considered their ulti- 
mate escape fortunate. On and on they sailed for dull days and nights, 
and always onward until they passed through the uncharted Fiji group 
and discovered the northern New Hebrides, never daring to land though 
they suffered all the pangs of starvation. Two meals a day each con- 
sisting of %5 of a pound of bread and % of a pint of water were all stern 
Captain Bligh allowed, for his destination was Timor, full 3,600 miles 
from Tonga. His journal describes their suffering in minute detail, 
and one must respect the courage and resourcefulness of the leader who 
cheated death a hundred times in the course of this awful voyage. 
Through starless nights of storm, bailing constantly, fighting the over- 
whelming sea, shivering in the rain, blinded by the roasting eastern 
sun, racked with pain, cramped almost beyond endurance as thev 
crouched sleepless within the boat, they still went on and on and 
each returning noon saw them nearly 100 miles nearer to Timor. 

Occasionally they succeed^ m seizing- the gulls which flew near the 



2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

boat, and each such prize was cut into 18 jDieces and devoured. Many 
sea-snakes were seen but it did not occur to Bligh to use them for food. 

One dark and stormy night they heard the roar of breakers close 
aboard and narrowly escaped being dashed to death upon the Great 
Barrier Eeef of Australia. On the following day, however, they suc- 
ceeded in sailing through a narrow opening in the reef, elated to find 
themselves upon smooth waters under the protection of the coral flats. 
Here they ventured to land upon several small deserted islands where 
they feasted upon shellfish, replenished their store of water, and above 
all, enjoyed the luxury of sleep. 

Then on they went through Endeavour Strait growing daily weaker 
upon their reduced ration. Finally, on June 14, 1789, the people of 
the Dutch village of Coupang on Timor were horrified at the appear- 
ance of 18 ragged wretches reduced almost to skeletons who staggered 
and fell upon the shore while tears of joy streamed down their weatlier- 
beaten cheeks. 

For 47 days Bligh had sailed across 3,618 miles of almost uncharted 
ocean, passing dreaded islands of the Fijis and the New Hebrides, sur- 
mounting not only the perils of the sea but even greater dangers from 
murderous cannibals, and his courage as a leader, and skill as a navi- 
gator must inspire respect as long as the annals of Britain's navy are 
cherished as a record of heroism. 

But to return to Christian and the Bounty whom we left on that 
fateful morning of the 28th of April, 1789. 

Christian knew full well the skill and resource of Bligh and foresaw 
that should the cast-off commander reach England, Tahiti would be but 
a death-trap to the Bounty's pirate crew. He therefore set his course 
for the small island of Tubuai, one of the Austral group, about 250 
miles south of Tahiti. This lonely spot had been discovered by Captain 
Cook in 1777, who observed that the natives spoke the Tahitian dialect 
and appeared to be industrious cultivators of the soil. 

Upon the Bounty's arrival, they crowded in great numbers to the 
shore blowing their triton war horns and brandishing clubs. Christian 
therefore changed his course for Tahiti, where his old friends warmly 
welcomed the Bounty and her crew. Here, however, he remained only 
long enough to supply his ship with provisions and live-stock, and to- 
gether with a number of his Tahitian friends he sailed again to Tubuai, 
this time to be hospitably received. 

A criminal in the eyes of civilization. Christian maintained until his 
death the respect of his lawless crew. They addressed him always as 
" Mr. Christian " and the generous spirit he displayed in sharing every 
hardship, no less than his real ability as an executive, showed that had 
ho remained faithful to his country he might have died an admiral of 
the blue. As it was, he took his part in the immense labor of construct- 



A HISTOBT OF TAHITI " 

■ f„.t ,t Tubuai disRing himselt within the moat which encircled 
mg a tort at Ti buai digoi g j,^^ i^„^te passions 

the parapet with a depth of ^^ 'f ;"\,,^^i^ ^,,,4^1 disregard for 
of his ruffian associates, he corild "»'• 'r«' ^^^.^^^ 

human rights brought on a war of «^f™""f "^^"'^^^^^^l „„„„ded. 
and the whites in which Christian l"™f ™ f J^f „, ieMed 
Finally, despairing of the impossible task of '^^'^'^S;;*' y ^ 
tothe^;urmursof hismenandr.uruedo.em^^^^^^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^ 

, ^Td itt":* heT'::^ ;s ted t- plige into the riotous pastimes 
r;:"wMirChristian with «." -rades reniai^ec^ on oar. 

rrr^;eXt='i::;::i:rs':;rthe b„„. fade 

from sight beneath the northern horizon. ^^.^.^^^ 

The expected came to pass !^^ ^^^^^o sui'vived among 

^"-But where was Christian and the Bo.U>, ^J^^^ 
avenging Pandora searched in vam, for, like the fate ot l.a 

f tlfe Bounty had become but o™"-- ^^^^f^ ° n^ ,!adtsMp. He 
Yet there was intelligent method '" « ;"7;Xtidshipman 

;;::rr:;ntrn^rt=^ 

: fTt s isoMS!aud at last when almost in '^^^^^ 
it nearly 180 miles from the longitude assigned by Carteret, but all 

^■^'ir i: «:: rL, tar from the paths of ^^^^J ^ -^ ^ - 

unprotected shore marked the last ancnora^e lu 

n::r d"iferti::1l" "- :^^^^^^ -gniug one to ea. 
0, h^s mti and to himselt, while the natives became wives and servants 

*" tncTcMrtian who had fled from all, now fell under the sad shadow 

wmmm 



2 2 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

sank down to the dull lusts of savagery's desires. Uncheered he heard 
his dark-skinned offspring romp and play and sport among the breakers 
of the shore, their mother's wanton spirit over all. A family worthier 
of his gentle name he might have reared in England, had he not in the 
exultation of revenge bartered his birthright to civilization. And lonely 
Pitcairn lost upon the sea was but a prison for his starving soul where 
he must languish through a waste of years, his sole alternative oblivion 
or the hangman's rope. 

Feuds bitter, unreasonable and prolonged arose on Pitcairn, and 
Christian soon was shot, and before ten years had passed midshipmen 
Edward Young and Alexander Smith were the sole surviving mutineers 
upon the island. Then a strange change came over Young, who ap- 
pears to have been a weak, rather than a vicious character. He de- 
termined to devote his remaining days to elevating the standards of the 
entire community. The Bible and Prayer Book that had belonged to 
Christian were recovered from the cave where they had lain for j^ears 
neglected, and thus the last of the ill-fated crew turned missionaries 
and school teachers to the women and children of the colony. In 1800, 
Young died, his end being unique in that his death was due to natural 
causes. Thus Smith became sole guardian of this strange community, 
winning as years passed their love and veneration ; for, indeed, he stayed 
the hand of rage and imparted to the rising generation true principles 
of civilization. 

Nearly twenty years had come and gone and the world had forgotten 
the Bounty in the stirring events of the first decade of the nineteenth 
century, when one day the American ship Topaz under Captain Eolger 
of Nantucket discovered an uncharted island, and a boat manned by 
brown-skinned English-speaking youths came out to welcome him. 
Thus was the retreat of the mutineers revealed; Alexander Smith, or 
"John Adams," as he now called himself being the sole survivor of 
the Bounty's pirate crew; and he lived the revered leader of the islanders 
until his death in 1829 at the age of sixty-five. 

The coming of the Bounty's mutineers to Tahiti in 1788 was an 
event of primary significance in the history of the island. Hitherto 
Tahiti had been a community of feudalisms, the power of the Ariirahi 
being constantly checked by the contending claims of rivals; but here 
as elsewhere over the South Seas, the coming of the white man tended 
at first to increase the power of the chief they came most in contact with 
though finally it led to the utter ruin of all native leaders including the 
"king" himself. 

The head chief of the District of Pare in 1789 was Pomare, the 
nephew of Purea, now grown to manhood. Cook had known him as 
" Outou,"^ but upon hearing his little son cough at night he had changed 

sOtoo's real name was Tunuicaite-atua, signifying descent from the gods. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 23 

his own name to Pomare (night cough). He was now in his prime and 
six feet four inches in height, and armed with a huge club, he was well 
equipped to inspire terror among his subjects. 

Pomare enjoyed the immeasurable advantage of being chief of the 
region of Papeete (the water basket), for this having the best harbor of 
the island enabled him to gather enormous fortunes of nails, hatchets, 
and red feathers from ships, only, however, to be robbed by his rivals 
upon the departure of his European friends. Thus when the Bounty 
came to Tahiti he was in the direst straits having been forced to " declare 
dividends " for the benefit of every other Ariirahi of the island. How- 
ever the sixteen mutineers marooned upon Tahiti found it to their ad- 
vantage to aid Pomare, and they turned their guns upon his rivals with 
such cruel slaughter that in a few months he was tyrant not only of 
Tahiti but of the island of Eimeo. Probably it was fortunate for his 
schemes that no sooner was his tyranny secured than the avenging 
Pandora came to capture and remove his villainous assistants, who 
doubtless would in the end have murdered their royal master. 

This period wherein one of the high chiefs secured the services of 
unprincipled white men armed with guns had its parallel in Fiji where 
it led to the rise of Mbau; in Hawaii it enabled Kamehameha to con- 
quer the entire archipelago; and in Tonga, aided by Europeans, it 
secured the preeminence of George Tubou. 

As in the wars of the roses, the leaders suffered more than the people 
in these bloody raids for power, and thus the commoners, their local 
overlords being slain, began to rise in influence, and something akin to 
public opinion commenced to murmur as a growing check upon the 
tyrant who now assumed the role of autocrat whereas formerly he had 
been but a moderator. Thus in old times, generosity was considered to 
be an aristocrat's highest virtue, and often he gave so lavishly of the 
tribute he received that in worldly goods he was poorer than many a 
servant in his train. 



[Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxxvi, No. 4; pp. 403- 

410, April, 1915. [ 



A HISTOKY OF TAHITI. II 

By Dr. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

CAEKEGIE INSTITUTION OP WASHINGTON 

BUT now an era of greed and hate had come, and as traders scattered 
firearms among the chiefs, war degenerated into mnrder, and in an 
orgie of viciousness inspired by drinlc, degraded by vile whites, and 
depleted by introduced disease, the natives dwindled rapidly. The vast 
numbers seen by Cook and Wallis were no more. In 1798 William 
Wilson estimated the jDopulation at only 16,000, but in 1802 according 
to Jefferson and Scott, it was not greater than 7,000 and, Ellis says 
the death rate exceeded the births until 1820 when other influences 
developed which tended to stem the tide of extinction. But Admiral 
Wilkes states that up to 1839 the births and deaths were almost exactly 
equal in numbers, and even to-day there are not more than 7,000 natives 
on the Island of Tahiti. 

This fixity of population after an initial period of decline has been 
observed elsewhere in the South Seas. In Tahiti it was due mainly to 
the introduction of Christianit}^, which prohibited infanticide and human 
sacrifices, and checked native warfare. At the same time, however, the 
adoption of Christianity contributed to the increase of certain fatal 
diseases, notably tuberculosis, through the enforced wearing of dirty 
European clothing, and the too hastily effected efforts of European 
teachers to develop " the family ties " thus causing the natives to huddle 
together in unsanitary, ill-ventilated "shanties" of European pattern. 
The listlessness and loss of interest in life resulting from the prohibi- 
tion or disuse of old games, arts and crafts, also led to the development 
of clandestine immoralities and drunkenness, and in many groups the 
population has decreased steadily and is still declining. Thus in the 
Marquesas the decline has been from about 20,000 in 1842 to about 
3,400 in 1911; in Hawaii from 130,300 in 1832 to 29,800 in 1900; in 
Tonga from 30,000 in 1880 to 17,500 in 1900; in Samoa from 37,000 
in 1849 to 31,300 in 1882; in Fiji from about 140,000 in 1871 to 87,000 
in 1911; and in New Zealand from 44,000 in 1881 to 40,000 in 1891. 

As the Tahitian proverb said : " The hibiscus shall grow and the coral 
shall spread out its branches, but man shall cease." 

The truth appears to be that after generations of repeated infection, 
the native blood has developed a partial immunity, although in com- 

24 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 



25 




26 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



parison with the Caucasian, the South Sea Islander still remains de- 
ficient in ability to resist disease. 

All through the hideous period initiated by the coming of the white 
adventurer, the decimation due to disease was even greater than that 
caused by war ; for savage warfare consists mainly in ambushing solitary 
stragglers, rarely in extended frontal attacks, or sieges of fortified posi- 




Caladiums in a Tahitian Valley. 



tions. Thus in the two years 1864-'65, due to smallpox, the popula- 
tion of Happoa and Taipi valleys in the Marquesas Islands sank from 
2,000 to 150. Well might the Samoan father pray to Tangaloa "drive 
away from us sailing gods [white men] who bring disease and death." 
Infinite mischief was wrought during this early chaotic period when 
every evil invention of civilization was placed in the hands of the natives 
without check or hindrance to its abuse. The most degraded of our 
race exerted their demoralizing influence to satiety upon the defenceless 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 



27 





Peak in Fautaua Valley, Tahiti. 



28 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



natives, and accounts of old voyages bristle with disgusting narratives of 
debauchery. It became a common thing to kidnap the natives of the 
New Hebrides and carry them to Australia to work as "indentured 
laborers" upon plantations. Thus did Chile practically exterminate 
the population of Eastern Island for the development of her nitrate 
deposits. 

Then in March, 1797, when things were at their worst, a ship whose 
mission was designed to be one of mercy came to sorrowing Tahiti. She 
was the Duf, under Captain James Wilson, and she brought eighteen 
English missionaries whom the London Missionary Society had sent 




\ .M i,i:v 111 Tai'. 



iiAio NrivAiiivA Island, Marqubsas. 



into tlie Pacific with tlie avowed purpose of converting the natives to 
Christianity. It is true that in 1772 two vessels from Peru had visited 
Tahiti and in 1774 Spanish priests were landed, but in the course of a 
year they had left without making converts. 

Pomare and Idia his consort received the strangers kindly and pre- 
sented them with a large house which had been built for Captain Bligh 
by the side of the Vaipopoo river near Point Venus. These missionaries 
were chiefly mechanics, artisans and small tradesmen of nonconformist 
turn of mind, and the natives were quick to appreciate the advantage 
which might accrue to them through the maintenance of a forge and a 
well-equipped carpenter shop; but official enthusiasm cooled when the 
visitors refused to fashion weapons of war. Still they were more than 
tolerated for their gifts of axes, knives and cloth, altliough the chiefs 
politely requested them to refrain from "parau" (exhortation). 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 



29 



The time was not propitious for the immediate acceptance of Chris- 
tianity. Diseases of European origin were ravaging the land, affecting 
almost every family, and the natives were convinced that the white man's 
god had brought the evils which were destroying them; so when the 
missionaries prayed, the natives dragged the diseased and the deformed 
out upon the village green, and exposing them to view, cried, " See what 
your god has wrought ! " 

During these early years when many a grave error might have been 
avoided, the missionaries appear to have lacked a leader whose heart was 
great with human sympathy, and who, as Ellis says, would have per- 
ceived that 

when the spirit is softened or subdued under the influence of suffering, it is 
often most susceptible of salutary impression; and the exercise of christian 
sympathy and kindness in such a season will seldom fail to produce even among 
the most barbarous tribes highly favorable results. 

In place of words of love, these missionaries preached the horrors of 
hell, in place of poverty they displayed that which was to the natives 
unbounded wealth; and friendship they sought to win through gifts 
rather than sympathy. 

Before passing judgment upon them, however, it is but fair to pause 
to consider the probable results had they attempted to pursue the less 
worldly cou.rse. Demon worship was and is the religion of the Poly- 
nesian, and even to-day, despite the efforts of generations of high-minded 
and enlightened whites, the natives cling tenaciously to their god of 
hate and delight above all in sermons treating of his infinite power for 




PisoNiA Teee, Pakaeava Atoll, Paumotis Groups. 



3° 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




Woods in Hamuta Valley, Tahiti. 



vengeance. Moreover, steeped as they have always 'been in communistic 
socialism, personal poverty is unknown and can thus make no appeal 
upon the side of virtue. Where wealth is naught, power is everything, 
and it is doubtful whether any considerable number of the natives could 
have been converted to Christianity even in a century had the mission- 
aries not first won over, or forced, the chiefs to accept their faith. 

Moreover, Pomare and all the chiefs realized that this white man's 
religion would never acknowledge the divinity of their descent, in de- 
fault of which their authority to enforce the tabu, the keynote of their 
power, was lost. 

Foiled thus in their direct effort to Christianize Tahiti, the mis- 
sionaries, as elsewhere in the Pacific, south to strengthen their position 
through diplomacy and political activity, hoping thereby to gain the 
ascendency of power and thus cause their doctrines to become more 
acceptable to the natives. 

Many things have been said and will be said both for and against 
the missionary, and we must grant that he has done both good and evil, 
or, perhaps better, we may say out of the evident good he has accom- 
plished some harm has come, for the missionary must needs have had 
the sympathy of a St. Augustine, the political wisdom of a Pitt, the 
leadership of a Bismarck, and the Christian spirit of the old bishop in 
" Les Miserables " to check the reign of death he found around him. 
What wonder, then, that, being in general but an ordinary man of good 
intentions, he in some measure failed. There have, indeed, been grand 
men among the missionaries — such were William Ellis of Tahiti, the 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 31 

Giilicks of Hawaii, and the great John Williams who after twenty-three 
years of wandering and privation was martyred njion the New Hebrides 
in 1839. Certainly before they came all was ripening to ruin, and if 
ruin has come despite their zealous efforts it indicates only that the 
problem was too complex perhaps for the mastery of any man however 
good or wise. 

Be these things as they may, the nobler and in the end the wiser 
course would have been attained had these early Tahitian missionaries 
labored on for years simply to help and to win the respect and love of 
those around them; and throLigh kindness to gain the hearts of willing 
converts to their faith. 

But reports must be written and sent to London, and upon the im- 
pression these accounts would make the continued existence of the 
mission might depend. The christianization of Tahiti tended in a sense 
to degenerate into a "business," and as such its success might be 
measured in terms of time and number. It is only in the sad stern 
school of experience that we learn in things of charity between man and 
man, and these pioneer missionaries lacked the advantage of an historic 
past to point the way to slower but truer betterment of those for whose 
welfare they labored so zealously. 

Moderation, charity and intelligent sympathy are all things of these 
later years in religion, when as the trappings of the priestly autocrat 
have fallen away the spiritual leader stands revealed. Expediency sug- 
gested the worldly course, and the Tahitian missionaries who at first had 
declined to take sides in native wars or fashion weapons now gave guns 
to Pomare, aiding him in his bloody quarrels. 

As we read in the " Memoirs of Ariitaimai," a Chiefess of Tahiti, 
Pomare determined to destroy his rivals and 

knew that what he was trying to do could be done only by wholesale destruc- 
tion, and that in order to do it he must depend on outsiders; white men, or 
Eaiatians, or savages from the Paumotos. The missionaries knew it also, for 
Pomare made no secret of it, and yet they recorded it as though it did not con- 
cern them. 

From this time onward until the French annexed Tahiti the mis- 
sionaries were the leaders of a party in the State, and the history of the 
mission is an unwholesome commingling of religious zeal with political 
aspiration. 

Friends they doubtless won, for they were brave and earnest men, 
but enemies they certainly aroused. Their patron Pomare I. did not take 
kindly to their doctrines, but he was enough of a diplomat to properly 
appraise their value to him as aids on his raids of murder. According 
to the "Memoirs of Ariitaimai" the action of the missionaries is sum- 
marized as follows: 



32 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

Alternately praying for peace and helping Pomare and Tu (Pomare II.) to 
make war, the missionaries innocently hastened the destruction of the natives 
and encouraged the establishment of a tyranny impossible for me to describe. 
Pomare was vicious and cruel, treacherous and violent beyond the code of 
chiefly morals, but Pomare was an angel compared with his son. 

Pomare II. reveals this policy in a na'ive letter which he wrote in 
1807 to the Directors of the London Missionary Society and which ap- 
pears in their "Narrative of the Mission at Otaheiti" published in 1818. 
In this labored epistle he asserts his firm faith and deep love in Jehovah 
(he was then indulging in every practise of the Tahitian religion), and 
after calling attention to the fact that he is beset with enemies, and is 
the only powerful friend the missionaries have, and that should he die 
the lives of his dear friends would be imperilled, he ends by expressing 
his desire for guns and ammunition. 



[Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxxvi, No. 5, pp. 452- 

466, May, 1915.] 



A HISTOEY OF TAHITI. Ill 

By De. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON 

SUDDENLY^ on September 3, 1803, Pomare I. died, and was suc- 
ceeded by his son, the weak, savage, drunkard Pomare 11. ; who 
even with European aid was unable to maintain his power, so detested 
was he even in his own ancestral district. Thus, in 1808, the new 
"king," together with his ministerial allies, were forced to flee to the 
Island of Einieo, the Tahitians under Opuhara of Papara having utterly 
routed them without a convert having been gained to Christianity. 

After this, in October, 1809, all but two of the missionaries set sail 
for Australia, leaving only Mr. Nott and Mr. Hayward, who retreated to 
the Island of Huahine, leaving their friend the "king" a lonely exile 
upon the little Island of Eimeo, his " Elba " being but ten miles long 
and five wide. Deserted and helpless, even his native district lost, 
Pomare came to realize that his sole hope lay in inducing the mis- 
sionaries to return to his aid. Thus, in 1811, did Pomare II. regain 
his allies, exhibiting his " change of heart " by begging for baptism from 
their hands in July, 1812. 

This case is by no means unique among the annals of missionary 
success in the Pacific, for Thakombau of Fiji became a convert only 
when missionary aid became indispensable to maintain his power, and 
George Tubou of Tonga gained greatly in material things through his 
acceptance of Christianity. 

In order to appreciate the victory of the missionaries in causing 
Pomare to accept Christianity, we must remember that the high chiefs 
in Polynesia were leaders in spiritual far more than in temporal things, 
and conversion was tantamount upon their part to an abnegation of 
their godly origin. Thus it was that at first no natives would follow 
the example of Pomare, all believing him to be mentally deranged. His 
act seemed that of a Sampson who in despair had crashed the temple 
upon his own head. 

Converts followed slowly, some from conviction, others probably 
perceiving, as Pomare appears to have done, the worldly advantages to 
be gained, and thus in 1813 the idols of Eimeo were publicly burned to 
the great joy of the missionaries, who thereafter gained rapidly in 
political power and religious authority, arming their converts with both 

33 



34 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




TiiK DiADEJi," Fautaka N'allev, Tahiti. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 35 

guns and Bibles.^ Thus in 1815 the missionary party became strong 
enough to invade Tahiti; and in November of that year they gained a 
decisive victory, killing Opuhara, the leader of " the Conservatives/' and 
enabling Pomare to capture and destroy the idol of the great god Oro, 
the " ancestor of the chiefs," a huge, uncarved log covered with red and 
yellow feathers. Thus through methods savoring more of Mahomet than 
of Christ was Tahiti converted. 

Soon all old customs were crushed out ; European clothing and man- 
ners were introduced, and rigid laws were enacted obliging all to con- 
form to the outward forms of Christian worship. 

A priestly despotism similar to that which prevailed in the seven- 
teenth century in Puritan Kew England was inaugurated; the Sabbath 
commencing on Saturday afternoon every one being obliged under 
penalty of a heavy fine to attend the services of the church. To-day, 
in the Ellice and Gilbert islands and in other remote parts of Polynesia, 
a similar tyranny is maintained. 

Pomare was " king," but his power was broken never to be restored, 
and the actual government of Tahiti was in European hands. 

The tabu system having been destroyed, Mr. ISTott, one of the 
original missionaries, devised a code of laws in 1819, the "king," chiefs, 
and people all approving by raising their hands at a public gathering. 
These laws were still further elaborated in 1826 and were designed to 
provide a regular system of taxes (tribute), and penalties. The follow- 
ing table may be interesting, for it serves to give an insight into the 
mental character, spirit of toleration, and power to enforce their rule 
enjoyed by the missionaries: 

Crime Fenalty 

Working on Sunday, first offense. To make a road 300 feet long and 

6 feet wide. 
Working on Sunday, second offense. A road 660 feet long. 

Stirring up rebellion. A, road 660 feet long. 

Murder or infanticide. Banishment to some lonely island 

for life. 
Bigamy for men. A road 240 feet long and 6 feet 

wide. 
Bigamy for women. To make two floor-mats. 

For being tatoned. A road 60 feet long, and the tatoo- 

marks to be obliterated by blacking 

them over. 
Drunkenness in men. A road 30 feet long. 

Drunkenness in women. Two large mats. 

Stealing a pig. A fine of 4 pigs, two for the owner 



As Ellis says 



and two for the king. 



the law which prohibits labor on the Sabbath day is perhaps enforced by a pen- 
alty disproportionate to the offense. 

6 See "The Memoirs of Arii Taimai," p. 360. 



36 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




House and Natives of Bora Bora, Society Islands. 



In most of these penalties a part of the fine went to benefit the Idng 
or district chief, who thus profited througli the dereliction of his sub- 
jects; and the system of espionage and development of hypocrisy and 
deceit resulting from such a system may well be imagined, or, if not 
comprehended, may be observed to-day among the natives of the Ellice 
and Gilbert Islands. 

Having given Tahiti a code of laws, the missionaries proceeded to 
write out the plan of a " constitutional monarchy " and a " parliament " 
patterned upon that of England, but Pomare and the high chiefs would 
have none of it, and the scheme could not be thrust upon the natives 
until after the death of the king in 1821 ; when owing to his son Pomare 
III. being an infant, a " regency " was established and the power of the 
missionary party was much augmented, although always opposed by the 
conservatives under Tati, chief of Papara. 

Thus in less than a decade were the Tahitians driven over the road 
of political and social progress that Europe had toiled a thousand years 
to traverse. The natives were forced to harken to the voices of men of 
an alien race whose traditions differed wholly from their own, and who 
looked with ill-concealed contempt upon the religion, folk-lore and arts 
of old Tahiti, forgetful of the fact that there was much in native culture 
that was good and should have been encouraged as a basis for future 
development. 

Perhaps the saddest mistake that has been made in the universal 
attempt to introduce our civilization among the simpler races has been 
the destruction of almost all that once was theirs in the hope that 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 3 7 

things of our own creation miglit arise. Instead, the natives have lost 
much and gained but little. Under friendly direction, the wonderful 
wood carving of the Maoris might have been preserved and modified to 
find a profit-producing market for the natives. The embroidered mats of 
the Marshall Islanders were the admiration of all who beheld them, so 
beautiful were their designs and soft their texture. Even so low a race 
as that of Australia can produce basket-work of superior quality which 
if honestly encouraged could provide a means of attaining affluence from 
the native standpoint. The salvation of their very souls lies in the 
maintenance of their respect as self-supporting men and women, yet 
even while we preach morality, we permit their only hope of maintain- 



Council House at 1'aaia, Tahiti, where the hiSt native king was crowned. 

ing it to dwindle through our own neglect to find a market for the fruits 
of their labor and invention. Yet, happily, a ray of hope has come, and 
on the island of Badu in Torres Straits a laudable attempt is being made 
by an incorporated English company under the direction of the Eever- 
end F. W. Walker to teach the natives money-making arts and trades 
and, above all, to procure and develop a market for their wares. No 
surer road to the attainment of civilization and Christianity could be 
found and there is a most significant contrast between the industrious, 
happy natives of Badu, whose faces are alive with intelligence, and hope, 
and their listless cousins of other islands in Torres Straits. 

Perhaps it was but natural that these early Tahitian missionaries 
grew too greatly to fear mistakes upon the part of the natives, forgetting 
that the teacher must not do the reading for the child. 



38 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 




House keae Papaea, Tahiti. 

A semblance of order and rectitude fell over the stultified life of the 
natives, while hidden beneath the surface vile things survived concealed. 
Such a vision of " righteousness " one sees among that most " orderly, 
well behaved, and moral" community; the convicts of our own state's 
prisons. Yet progress lives only where action is free to try the unkno',\-u, 
hoping that despite mistakes truth may thereby be revealed, and in pi o- 




NaTIVE IIUUSE AT I'Al'AKA, 'i'AIUTI. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 39 

portion as men have won this right does bigotry lose its hold upon their 
souls. 

Yet happily -there are other and more important sides to this picture 
of the work the missionaries accomplished in Tahiti. Eather the truth 
is that, realizing the fundamental good they accomplished, we, in our 
regret for their partial failures, are disposed to dwell too deeply upon 
the darker side. Let us therefore not forget the better things they 
wrought for, and the difficulties which their courage surmounted. Had 
they not come there would be no native race living in the Tahiti of to- 
day, for with their success, the institutions of infant murder, human 
sacrifice, native warfare and the society of the Aroei disappeared forever 
from the land. 

Nor must we overlook the bravery of this little band, every one of 
whom had been threatened many times with death, and at least one of 
whom had fallen a victim to native hatred. Friendless and far from 
home, alone, and unprotected, they had labored steadfastly throughout 
the long sad years of apparent failure, and it seems but natural that in 
the end they became in some measure the victims of the elation of 
success. 

It was fortunate that from 1817 to 1824 William Ellis, a kindly, 
tactful and courageous man lived as a missionary upon Tahiti, for not 
only did he give us in his well-known " Polynesian Eesearches " the 
fullest account extant of Tahiti in old days, but his efforts were directed 
toward encouraging new industries to take the place of many occupa- 
tions which had been lost. 

Among all the missionaries, Ellis appears to be the only one who 
expressed regret at the abeyance of such harmless sports as archery, 
surf -board riding, playing with miniature canoes, flying kites, and 
swinging upon ropes; for the Tahitians were not gamblers as were the 
Hawaiians; but he says 

the adults [Tahitians] do not appear to have thought of following this [archery] 
or any other game since Christianity has been introduced among them. 

Moreover in Tahiti, as elsewhere under the domination of European 
culture, the native crafts of wood-carving and tapa manufacturing were 
discouraged and lost, and the great double-decked canoes one hundred 
feet in length with their ornately carved bows curving upward, were 
made no longer, and even the Ariirahi's state canoe, called the Anuanua 
(the rainbow), was doomed to disappear. 

In speaking of Tahiti as it was in 1839, Admiral Charles Wilkes, 
who always champions the introduction of European culture, says: 

The change of dress which has been introduced by the missionaries, and 
other foreigners, has had an injurious effect on the industry of this people. 
While they wore the native tapa the fabric, though of little value, gave employ- 
ment to numbers of women; and this change of dress intended as an advance 



4° 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



in civilization, has had the effect of superseding employments which formerly 
engaged their attention and occupied their time. The idleness hence arising, 
and the artificial wants thus created, have no little influence in perpetuating 
licentiousness among the females, to whom foreign finery is a great temptation. 

In old days beautiful bowls, pillows and seats were carved by the 
natives out of single pieces of wood, but these also were doomed when 
brought into competition with even the crudest articles of European 




Eastee Isla.nu Stone Image in the Gakden of the Estate of John Brandee, Esq., 

AT Papeete, Tahiti. 



manufacture, and moreover their symbolism was repugnant to the new 
regime, for it maintained the memories of old traditions. 

It should be said that in 1818 the missionaries sought to introduce 
such civilized employments as the manufacture of cotton cloth, and the 
cultivation of sugar, coffee and tobacco, and the making of lime for 
the concrete required in the construction of the ugly, stuffy, little stone 
houses which were intended to supplant the well-ventilated native 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 41 

thatch. They even went so far as to import a Mr. Gyles from Jamaica 
to introduce the manufacture of sugar from the cane. He succeeded, 
but Pomare and the chiefs became fearful that should the industry 
prove commercially profitable foreign men-of-war would descend upon 
Tahiti and the natives would be deprived of their lands and reduced to 
slavery as were the Indians of the West tndies. The opposition of the 
chiefs was of so determined a nature that the missionaries deemed it 
advisable to desist from their attempt, and their effort to introduce a 
cotton-cloth mill met with similar discouragement. 

Indeed, it is doubtful whether the child-like natives would have been 
either happier or better as mill hands laboring eight or ten hours a day 
in distilleries or factories than they were each in his own house beneath 
the palm groves and depending upon the rich bounty of the land and 
sea for food and clothing. These European autocrats sought in all re- 
forms to begin at the top, and had they displayed the good judgment to 
teach merely the rudiments of religion, government and agriculture, and 
to encourage and develop a market for the crafts the natives already 
practised, they would probably not have felt obliged to complain to 
Admiral Wilkes that "sincere piety was rarely to be found among the 
natives." 

In 1821 a rebellious return to idolatry broke out among the young 
and aristocratic element, and after this was sternly suppressed a fanat- 
ical sect, the Mamaia, arose in 1828, their leader claiming to be Christ 
and promising a sensual paradise to his followers. The natives who at 
first had expected miracles from the white man's god, were now begin- 
ning to lose faith and interest and to loathe the dull life their masters 
forced upon them, and in 1839, Avhen Admiral Wilkes visited Tahiti he 
was surprised to find the attendance upon worship on Sunday to be 
small,. Iess_ than 200 being present in the church, and most of these 
being women who "did not appear to be as attentive as they had been 
represented." These women, he says, 

were dressed in a most anbecoming manner in high flaring chip bonnets of their 
own manufacture, loose gray flowing silk frocks, with showy kerchiefs tied 
around their necks. 

The time has come when the natives of Polynesia are beginning to 
appeal for freedom to govern and maintain their own churches and 
under ministers of their own race; to suffer from their own mistakes 
and win their own achievements. 

Yet a great task still remains to the European co-worker for their 
enlightenment, for everywhere there is a crying need for manual train- 
ing and technical schools patterned upon the general plan of Booker 
Washington's Tuskegee Institute. Above all, markets must be sought 
and developed for the wares and produce of the natives, for most of their 
present apathy is due to the fact that they can obtain no adequate re- 



42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

muneration of the products of their labor, but are, in effect, penalized 
for their very industry through the rapacious acts of traders. 

Moreover, the present rule of the religious autocrat, essentially altru- 
istic and high minded as it is, has produced only obedient or servile 
children. Justice demands freedom for the Polynesian — room in which 
to struggle and to rise. It is an inadequate defense of the present sys- 
tem to say that it is immeasurably more humane than the savage rule of 
the old chiefs, for it has proven itself incompetent to raise a single 
native race into a position of self-supporting independence. We have 
given them the Bible, but we still withhold from them the means to win 
their moral self-respect. In other words, the task of the European is 




Canoe at Nuktjtavake Atoll, Paumotus. 

but half completed, and the effect of leaving it at this stage is all too 
apparent in long settled regions such as the Hawaiian Islands, where, 
after the most easily attained conversion in the history of the Pacific, 
the natives have steadily sunken, and are to-day a degraded, downcast 
remnant — mere peons of commercialism, their past forgotten and their 
future hopeless. 

How different this history might have been if along with instruction 
respecting the lives of Adam and Eve, Abraham, and Sampson, the mis- 
sionaries had maintained the native arts, modifying them to meet the 
demands of markets which might have provided the native race with a 
means of livelihood and replaced the lost ambition due to the abolition 
of war. Beautiful wall papers and screens might have been made from 
the delicate tapas of old Hawaii, and their women were once skilled to 
an unusual degree in feather work and weaving. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI A3 

We speak of the island races as being " lazy," forgetting that there is 
as yet no adequate reward for their labor. When opportunity offers, they 
strive well, as in the crude process of the copra industry, which, after 
having been introduced by the great German merchant, GodefEroy, in 
the middle of the nineteenth century, has proved to be the commercial 
salvation of Polynesia. 

But to return to the political history of Tahiti. On December 7, 
1821, Tomare II. died as a result of long-continued drunkenness, and on 
April 21, 1824, his son, a boy of four years, was crowned by Mr. Nott, 
one of the original missionaries as " Pomare III., constitutional king of 
Tahiti." The education of the young " king " was at once undertaken 
by the missionaries, but on January 11, 1827, he died of an epidemic 
which was then ravaging the island; and Aimata, his half sister, was 
proclaimed queen, taking the name of Pomare-Vahine (The Lady 
Pomare), although more commonly known as "Queen Pomare IV." 

At the time of her accession she was only about thirteen years of 
age, and thus dependent upon the missionaries for advice, and. as the 
sequel proved, rarely was queen more in need of broad-minded and tact- 
ful advisers, for the end of Tahitian independence was at hand, and the 
fateful question was— should England or should Prance assume the 
government of the island? 

Several elements in the foreign population were causing trouble to 
the natives, these being the traders who sought to bleed the Tahitians 
of all the little wealth they possessed, the degenerate deserters from 
ships and other parasitic whites who were a constant source of demorali- 
zation, and the sons of the missionaries, who, in general, lacked the 
altruism of their parents and sought to acquire land and to exploit the 
Island at the expense of the natives. Conditions such as these have 
worked themselves out in the Hawaiian Islands, ending by the descend- 
ants of the missionaries acquiring nearly all the lands the natives once 
possessed. 

In Tahiti the native chiefs, following the policy they adopted in 
respect to the cultivation of sugar cane, had determined to discourage 
the permanent residence of white men among them, and had steadfastly 
refused to sell or even to grant long leases to their land, and thus the 
natives as a race were still independent home-owners, and happy in the 
enjoyment of their accustomed means of obtaining sustenance. 

The salient fact is that the white settler in the tropics is concerned 
chiefly with his own profit, and but little with the elevation of the native 
race. Through artificial devices designed to restrict the liberty of the 
natives, or through the imposition of high taxes, the white man virtually 
peonizes the native race and forces the brown man to labor far beyond the 
little eSort required to provide all his natural needs, and in the end the 
profit accruing from such toil is found in the pockets of the white 




I'EAltL DIVKRS M 



,,,.. THKi. IlnrsE. IIiKrKnr Is.ano, P-uMoTrs. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 45 

man. To-day over those parts of the tropics wherein the white man 
gains a profit from the land, as in the Dutch East Indies or in parts of 
Africa, tliis modern ingenious form of slavery pertains. In other 
words, a form of commercial peonage has replaced the old possession of 
the body of the slave, and only in proportion as the land is poor, or 
markets far away, is the native rich in communal liberty. 

These facts, well appreciated as they are by the natives are the chief 
causes of racial distrust, for the native realizes that the European is his 
exploiter, not his friend. Unable to maintain his ground in open con- 
test, he has recourse to all manner of subterfuge. Much of his so- 
called "laziness" and "lack of ambition" results from these conditions, 
for while he is sufficiently industrious and often hard working in so far 
as his own personal needs and profits are concerned; if he can by any 
means avoid working for the white man's benefit he will do so, even 
though he must himself endure privation to accomplish this end.'^ 

Events in Tahiti moved slowly, for the age of the steamship had 
not yet come, and the South Sea Islands were still remote from the 
world's activity. 

In 1835 the Catholics began to establish missions among the Pacific 
Islands, and thus the French government acquired a plausible reason for 
sending men-of-war into the Pacific, avowedly to afi^ord protection to 
these missions, but in reality to expand the realms of France. 

In Tahiti the drama opened when two French priests. Fathers Laval 
and Caret, embarked upon a small schooner from Mangareva and landed 
on Tahiti on November 21, 1836. 

The antagonism between the protestant missionaries and their cath- 
olic co-workers was well known to these French priests, and thus they 
avoided Papeete, the only port of entr}^, and sought a landing upon the 
remote coast of Tautira on the eastern side of the Island. They then 
walked slowly along the shore toward Papeete preaching at frequent 
intervals, and gaining the ears of Tati and other leaders of the old con- 
servative party whose aspirations had been crushed by the missionary 
element in 1815. 

Henceforth the struggle lay between the protestants and the French, 
the Queen being but a puppet in the hands of Mr. Pritchard, a mis- 
sionary who was then serving as British Consul; and the upshot of the 
affair was that on December 13, 1836, the priests were expelled from 
Tahiti for having failed to respect the port regulations in landing 
surreptitiously at Tautira; their offer to pay the statutory fine being 
refused by the Queen. 

■^ A most interesting and thonglitful analysis of such conditions has been 
given by Sir Sydney Oliver, former Governor of Jamaica, in his book upon 
"White Capital and Colored Labor." 



46 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

But the martyr spirit was as strong in these French priests as in their 
protestant adversaries, and with unexpected suddenness they reappeared, 
this time as passengers on the American brig Colombo which anchored 
in Papeete Harbor on January 27, 1837. Their application for per- 
mission to land met with a prompt refusal, and with their disappear- 
ance the curtain falls upon the first scene of the drama. 

The second opens when on August 29, 1838, the Frencli frigate 
Ve7ius, under Commodore DuPetit-Thouars, bore down upon Papeete, 
and, training her guns upon the town, demanded first an apology, second 
2,000 Spanish dollars, and third a salute of twenty-one guns for the 
French flag. 

The native sources of money-revenue were derived largely from 
washing done for ships, of which employment Her Majesty and the high 
chiefs enjoyed a monopoly, and the hopelessness of attempting to pay 
this enormous indemnity was so overpowering that in her despair the 
Queen is said to have advised the ceding of the entire Island to the 
French. 

Even had the town been shelled, retreat to the hillsides Avould liave 
given the natives hardly more concern than in the days of Wallis, but it 
was far otherwise with the English residents, who, moreover, were al- 
ready^ scheming for a British protectorate. Thus the foreign resi- 
dents came to the aid of the Queen and the indemnity was promptly 
paid, the French, however, being obliged to provide the powder used to 
salute their own flag, for, as Mr. Pritchard states in his "Polynesian 
Ecminiscences," upon the entire Island there was not sufficient powder 
for more than five of the twenty-one shots required.^ 

The French Commodore then demanded a treaty by virtue of which 
Frenchmen of all professions were to be permitted to establish them- 
selves upon Tahiti; and after obliging the Queen to accept a French 
Consul of his own clioosing, the Venus sailed away. 

Most unwisely, immediately after the departure of the Venus, the 
Queen, instigated by Pritchard and the missionaries, issued a law for- 
bidding the teaching of Roman Catholic doctrines in Tahiti; when, like 
a bird of ill omen, another frigate L' Artemis e rose above the horizon, but 
in approaching the island she struck so heavily upon the coral reef 
that had it not been for native aid in towing her into Papeete Harbor 
she would have sunk. No sooner were lier injuries repaired, however, 
than her captain, running out his guns, demanded equal rights for both 
Catholics and Protestants, and the cession of a site for a Boman Catho- 
lic church. Soon after this in 1841 the chiefs of the old conservative 

8 This event is depicted in Plate No. 53 accompanying the "Voyage aiitour 
dn monde" by A. DuPetit-Thouars, Paris, 1841. 



A HISTORY OF TAHITI 47 

party applied to France for protection ; the Queen, instigated by Pritch- 
ard, having already addressed a similar a]3peal to England.'' 

A semblance of peace then fell upon the scene and for several years 
the wide waste of the Pacific seemed to afford the protection of isolation 
to the little island. But the government of Louis Philippe was casting 
covetous eyes upon the Pacific, usurpation at home having bred aggres- 
sion abroad; and in September, 1848, the sails of another frigate. La 
Reine Blanche, rose and shaped themselves upon that eastern horizon 
whence in other days Wallis, and Cook, and Bougainville had come, and 
the evil genius of Tahiti, DuPetit-Thouars, once more frowned down 
upon the affrighted land, and henceforth the history of Tahiti was to be 
that of a proud but conquered race. Now and again the sullen silence 
was to be broken by the flash of rebellion, but for fifty years the ever 
present troops of the conqueror comjDelled submission to his rule until 
at last a sad apathy as of resignation fell over the native race. Then 
in later years the Chinese have come in ever increasing numbers so that 
today the streets and lanes of Papeete swarm with a half-l)reed race — ■ 
an outpost of the orient. 

How different the fate of happy Fiji when life and order are secure 
yet not a British soldier guards the land. 

Great Britain responded by a pleasing but non-eommital letter, and a gift to 
the qneen of some household furniture, which through an irony of fate arrived 
just in time to be of service to Bruat, the first French Governor. 



[Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxxvi, No. 6, pp. 521- 

538, June, 1915. 



A HISTOEY OP FIJI 

By ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 
THE CAENEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON 

Part I 

/"\F all the island groups in the outer Pacific none surpass the Fijis 
^-^ in their rare comhination of beautiful scenery and interesting 
natives. The islands are upon the opposite side of the world from Eng- 
land, for the meridian of 180° passes through the centre of the group 
crossing the island of Taviuni. The islands lie from 15° 30' to 19° 30' 
south of the equator, and are thus south of the region of perpetual trade 
winds, but still well within the tropics, the center of the group being 
about 1,000 miles due north from New Zealand. 

That dauntless old rover, Abel Jansen Tasman, discovered them in 
1643 on his way from Tonga in the Heemshirh and Zeehaan and named 
them "Prince William's Islands" and "Heemskirk's Shoals." After 
this, they were all but forgotten until July 2, 1774, when Captain James 
Cook sighted the small island of Vatoa in the extreme southeastern end 
of the group. The natives fled into the forest upon the approach of 
his boat, and he contented himself by leaving a knife, some medals and 
nails in a conspicuous place. Finding many sea-turtles in the region, 
he named his land- fall " Turtle Island," and then departed from the 
Fijis never to return. 

In May, 1789, Captain Bligh sailed through the group in the small 
open boat in which he made the voyage of 3,600 miles from Tonga to 
Timor, this feat being celebrated in Byrons's poem " The Island." He was 
pursued by two canoes from Waya Island, and dared not land nor hold any 
communication with the natives. Later in 1792, Bligh again sailed among 
the Fijis, this time while in command of the msm-of-wsiT Providence, and 
in 1796 Captain Wilson cruised among the islands upon his missionary 
voyage in the Duff. Thus gradually the group became known to Euro- 
peans; but remained uncharted until 1840, when the United States Ex- 
ploring Expedition, under Wilkes, made a survey of the region. Indeed, 
the oldest detailed accounts of the islands and their inhabitants is that 
given by Wilkes in the third volume of his narrative of the expediton. 

Counting isolated rocks, the archipelago is composed of about 270 
islands having a total area of 7,400 square miles, or nearly the same as 
that of Massachusetts. Two of the islands are far larger than the 

48 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 49 

others, Vanua Levii (the great land) being about 100 miles long and 25 
miles wide, and Viti Levu (Great Viti) being 80 miles long and 55 
wide. Ivandavu and Taviuni have not one twentieth the land area of 
the two larger islands, and all the others are much smaller, so small 
indeed that only about 80 islands of the group are large enough to be 
inhabited. 

Geologically speaking, the Fijis are old and the volcanoes which 




gave rise to them have long ago subsided into their final rest. Yet even 
to-day there are reminders of more active times in an occasional earth- 
quake, or the hot springs of Ngau or of Savu Savu valley and other 
places on Vanua Levu, or the pumice, which at times rises to the sur- 
face of the sea and is cast ashore at Kandavu. The islands were once 
much larger and higher than they are to-da}', for tropical rains have 
washed the soft lavias into the surrounding sea, leaving here and there 
pinnacles of hard basalt towering upward in fantastic castellated forms 
and imparting a romantic beauty to the view which is surpassed only 
in the Society and Marquesas Islands. The little island of Kobu near 
Nairai is a mass of volcanic rock, 90 feet in height, and is so strongly 
magnetic that a compass placed upon its summit is deflected 85°. 

In the Fijis the erosion has gone so far that most of the old volcanic 
rims have disappeared. Totoya and Thombia are, however, beautiful 



50 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

cvq)-\ike craters, their centers now being harbors encircled by crescent- 
shaped ridges, and there are a few fairly well-defined craters among 
the mountains of the larger islands. Indeed, at Kambara a small vol- 
cano has in recent, but still prehistoric, times broken through the ele- 
vated coral reef, but no native myths speak of volcanic eruptions. 

The Fijis are much older than the large islands of the Hawaiian 
group or than some of the Samoan and Tongan islands, the volcanoes 
of which are still active. Indeed, in the interior of Viti Levu plutonic 
rocks and slates are found attesting to the considerable age of this 
island, allying it to such land masses as New Zealand or New Caledonia, 
which are partly volcanic and partly continental in character. Thus 
the Fijis differ from the simple volcanic tumuli which constitute the 
Hawaiian, Samoan, Society and Marquesas islands. In Hawaii and 
Tahiti we find great central volcanic peaks, from the summits of which 
deep valleys radiate outward to the sea, but in Fiji the large islands 
have been formed by fusions between many adjacent volcanic cones, and 
in later times the erosion has gone so far and local elevations and de- 
pressions have been so frequent that the landscape is broken and wholly 
irregular. 

Indeed, the islands have not been passive during all the ages in 
which the rains have worn them down, for there have been depressions, 
and also great upheavals here and there, as at Vanua Mbalavu, Avhere 
the old coral reef is now a bold precipice of overhanging castellated 
crags towering far above the waves that dash at its feet. This old coral 
rock is cavernated and, at least one j^laee along the shore, at Black 
Swan Point, on Vanua Mblavu Island, one may enter through a small 
cleft in the precipice and find oneself in a spacious chamber several hun- 
dred feet in height, with veil-like sheets of stalactites sparkling in the 
dim light that wanders inward through some hidden rift far up in the 
vaulted roof. A deep pool of wonderfully clear ocean water lies within 
this shadowy retreat, and brilliant blue and green fish flit butterfly-like 
through their natural aquarium, the floor of which is carpeted by grace- 
ful sea-whips, and slowly creeping crinoids with long feathery arms. 

Many other islands also exhibit elevated coral reefs, which in some 
cases, as at Vatu Vara, have been lifted nearly 1,000 feet above the sea, 
and, near Suva, the hillside is full of fossil sea-shells and corals. We 
can see that the islands were once much larger than they are to-day, 
for nearly every one is encircled by a coral reef several miles out to sea, 
which marks the contour of the old coast line. Indeed, at Astrolabe 
Reef, we find a small cavernated volcanic rock, the last remnant of an 
island, surrounded by a broad lagoon which is edged on its seaward 
side by a rim of coral reef over which the surf breaks ceaselessly. In 



»r0 



'im^^^i&f: 






A Ravine in Fiji, Viti Levu Islakd. 



52 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

other cases, as at Cakau-momo, the island has washed away and only 
the submerged reef is left to mark its former site. 

The very land has age and life and is vanishing before our eyes. In 
the past the islands were higher, but now the loftiest mountain peaks 
are not over 4,600 feet. 

The earthquake waves, which must have accompanied many of the 
changes of elevation, may have given rise to the myth of a deluge, which 
under varied forms is found almost universally among the natives of 
the tropical Pacific, but we need not resort to such remote or hypo- 
thetical occasions for the establishment of the flood-myths, for almost 
every year between February and March there is a severe storm in Fiji, 
and recent floods of the Eewa Eiver are now the topic of native song. 
It is to the rich tropical forest which clothes them that the Fijis 
owe their charm. Even the sheltered relatively dry leeward slopes of 
the mountains are fairly well covered with forest, but on the sides which 
face the southeast trade wind the vegetation crowds into every nook 
and cranny of the precipices even to the summits of the highest peaks. 
So copious is the rainfall that the Eewa Elver is larger than any in Eng- 
land and is navigable for fifty miles above its mouth, its width being 
fully three thousand yards, where it meets the ocean. 

The beauty of the mountain valleys produces an impression which 
time can not efface from the memory. Great Tahitian chestnuts, the 
"Ivi" (Inocarpus edulis), with buttressed trunks, tower far above like 
columns of an ancient temple garlanded in green, while overarching 
the rock pools of the stream are the rich brown stems of tree-ferns 
crowned by emerald sprays of nature's lace-work. Broad-leaved cala- 
diums cluster in the water, and the clambering Pandanus winds in rep- 
tilian folds over the high boughs, where dainty orchids nestle far from 
the reach of all below. Now and again there is a flash of color, where 
some cockatoo or parrot or brilliant butterfly appears only to vanish in 
the leafy maze, or here and there through a break in the canopy a 
furtive beam of sunlight penetrates to gild the greenness of the shade. 
One looks in vain for dead trees and old decaying logs for all is life in 
this luxuriant growth. Death has here no lasting place, for termites 
and ants and a host of parasitic plants set hungrily upon all that weaken, 
and the dying trunk shrinks into other greenness and passes phoenix- 
like into other life. Wilkes spoke truly when he said of the islands, " So 
beautiful was their aspect that I could scarcely bring my mind to the 
realizing sense of the well-known fact that they were the abode of a 
savage, ferocious and treacherous race of cannibals." To-day there are 
no cannibals, and one is safer in " dark Fijia " than in the streets of 
any civilized city. 

An extraordinary number of the forest trees of the Fijis furnish 



54 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

food for man. Such are the bread-fruit, which grows to be 50 feet 
high, with deeply incised gloss}^ leaves, sometimes almost two feet long. 
The Malay apple, or kavika {Eugenia), grows to a great height and 
bears a delicious fruit, which, when ripe, is white, streaked with deli- 
cate pink, and most refreshing and rose-like to the taste. The cocoanut 
palm clusters in dense groves along the beaches, the long leaves mur- 
muring to the sea breeze as they wave to and fro, casting their grateful 
shade upon the native village. Of all trees none is more useful to 
tropical man than the cocoanut. In time of drought it provides a life- 
sustaining drink, its leaves serve to thatch the sides of houses and its 
nuts become drinking cups, or provide oil or food; its wood serves for 
manifold purposes; its terminal bud is the celery of the tropical epi- 
curean, and the sap from its flower-stalk provides an intoxicating bev- 
erage. Indeed, to do justice to its uses would lead us so far afield that 
we must perforce desist. Curiously, the cocoanut thrives only on the 
lowlands near the ocean, and flourishes best where the sea-spray settles 
upon its leaves, or even where its roots sink beneath the level of the 
salt water. Very rarely one sees a cocoanut palm growing upon the moun- 
tain side at Tahiti, up to 800 feet above the sea, but this is exceptional. 
Eananas and the wild plantain (Fei) grow luxuriantly in the forest, 
as do also oranges, lemons, limes, shaddocks, guavas, alligator pears, 
the papaw, mango and many other smaller shrubs and vegetables. 
Indeed, from remote times the natives have cultivated the soil, and their 
principal farinaceous food to-day consists in the yam (Dioscorea), 
which becomes from four to eight feet in length, and in the dalo, a 
caladium, which grows in swampy places. In time of harvest they 
often bury the breadfruit, dalo or bananas in pits lined thickly with 
leaves and covered with earth and with stones to foil the pigs. Treated 
thus, the fruit ferments and may remain for months before being cooked 
and eaten. Famine is indeed all but impossible in the high islands of 
the tropical Pacific. 

In the rich soil of the broad Eewa valley sugar-cane is cultivated 
extensively. Cotton becomes a perennial tree in Fiji and produces an 
exceptionally good quality of boll. Delicious pineapples grow on the 
less fertile soils, and coffee thrives on the mountain slopes. Indeed, 
had the Fijis but a market for their produce, they would outstrip 
Hawaii as centers of agricultural industry. 

Even in savage days the natives delighted to cultivate flowers, and 
the chiefs wore garlands of blossoms around their heads as do the young 
men and maidens of to-day. It was by means of the flowers that they 
knew the months, for the scarlet blooms of Erythrina marked the season 
for the planting of crops. June was heralded by the "tombebe" 
flowers along the shore, and when the ivi with its violet-scented flowers 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 



55 



bloomed in the forest, the natives watched, knowing that it was nearing 
JSTovember when upon the morning of the moon's last quarter the water 
over the reef would be crowded by 
myriads of the Mbalolo worms swim- 
ming only to burst and shrivel with the 
rising of the sun, thus casting forth 
their eggs into the sea, after which the 
worms, emptied of eggs, sink as mere 
translucent skins to die upon the bot- 
tom. This was the great feast of the 
Mbalolo, the Kew Year's Day of former 
times, when bearers would be despatched 
to carry the cooked worms nicely wrap- 
ped in leaves to far-off chiefs among the 
mountain valleys. 

Once from an old man I gathered a 
nwth of the Mbalolo to the effect that 
long ago their ancestors were sailing 
over the sea, while one of the sea-gods 
guarded the canoe and each day sent 
food in the form of the Mbalolo, but 
one old man, fearing it might not be 
continued, collected more than was re- 
quired for the day and hid it beneath a 
mat. Whereupon the god visited the 
canoe and detected the Mbalolo through 
the odor arising from its decomposi- 
tion. In a rage, he swore never again 
to provide food for the ingrates ; but the 
old man taunted him, saying that the 
real reason was he had lost the power to 
cause the worms to appear. Thus, in 
order to show that he still had power to 
produce it, the Mbalolo is permitted to 
swarm only upon the mornings of the 
last day of the October, and espe- 
cially of the November moon. Accord- 
ingly, October is called Vula i Mbalolo leilei (the moon of the little 
Mbalolo) and November Vula I Mbalolo levu (the moon of the Great 
Mbalolo). In Samoa, this worm is called Palolo from Pa, to burst, 
and lolo, oily, referring to the oily appearance of the water when 
myriads of the worms burst and cast forth their eggs. 

I suspect this myth to be of recent origin, for it bears a suspiciously 




A Maiden of Kambaea, Fiji. Type 
of the Viti-Tonga race. 



56 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



close resemblance to the manna story in the Bible. Moreover, the old 
Fijian mythology asserts that their original ancestors were created in 
Fiji and did not sail over the ocean to these islands. It is remarkable 
how quickly a new myth may arise among a simple people. Certain 
floods which occurred within the century have passed into mythology, 
and one of the mountain tribes has a song of the marvellous manner 
in which sugar is made at the recently established sugar mill on the 
Eewa river. A tower of Babel myth has arisen since the conversion to 
Christianity, and, in Tahiti, a recently originated folk story tells of the 
creation of the first woman Ivi from a bone of the first man. 

The Fijians are of mixed stock. Their dark brown skin, thick 
mop-like heads of hair, broad noses, and full lips betoken Papuan an- 
cestry of remote African origin, and probably the earliest inhabitants 
were of purer Negroid blood than those of the present, for there lias 




Women of Fiji. The long uncut locks indicate that a woman is unmarried. 



A IJI^TOEY DF FIJI 



57 




Natives ov Kambaiia Island, Fiji. 



been a constant admixture with the Polynesians, who, being good navi- 
gators, have peopled the remote islands of the outer Pacific. For ages 
this admixnre has been checked through the practice of the Fijians of 
killing and eating strangers who were stranded upon their shores, and 
it is interesting to see that it is only in the small islands of the Lau 
group of the Fiji archipelago that a decided mingling of the Papuan 
and Polynesian elements is observed. These Lau islands are set one 
after another, like the leeward isles of the West Indies, in a long 
sweeping crescent along the eastern edge of tlie archipelago, and are only 
about 270 miles west of Tonga, hence the Tongans, under their great 
chief Maafu, overran them, killing the men land capturing the women, 
and producing a tall, fine-featured, brown-skinned "Vititonga" race, 
far superior to the negroid peoples of the western islands of the Fijis. 
In Fiji, as elsewhere in the Pacific, the strongest natives live along 



58 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

the shore where coral reefs and cocoanuts afford ahimdant and varied 
food. At times these shore tribes welcomed the coming of Tongans 
among them, for they are far better navigators and more intelligent 
than the Papuans of ancient Fiji, and they taught the art of canoe 
building. Indeed, pigs and chickens and certain vegetables are thought 
to have been introduced by this back wave of Polynesian immigration 
from Tonga. 

Among the mountain valleys of Viti Levu one may still see traces 
of the stunted, sooty-skinned, long-armed, mop-headed negroid uace of 
old Fiji, while in the eastern parts of the group and along the fertile 
coasts the natives are superior both mentally and physically. The 
average height of the chiefs is fully six feet, they stand superbly erect, 
no student's stoop disfiguring the proud shoulders of these noblemen of 
nature's making. The skin is rich bronze-brown, the lips full, but not 
protrusive, the nose not especially flattened, and the hair alone re- 
mains i\.frican and grows into a huge stiff mop which they periodically 
cover with lime, causing it to lose its black color and to assume a tawny 
brown-red hue. The eye lacks the languid softness of the Polynesian's 
and is small, swine-like and often bloodshot, imparting a cruel aspect 
to the visage. 

Yet, withal, the native grace and unconscious dignity of these 
superb people, especially those of chieftain's rank, produces a profound 
impression. Physically they seem to be a finer race than we, 5^et they 
lack the endurance of the Caucasian, and soon succumb to prolonged 
exertion, or fall a ready victim to disease. Thus the measles in 1875 
assumed the character of a veritable plague, more than one quarter 
of the population perishing, while in many villages the children starved, 
and the dead were devoured by hogs, for none were left to bury them. 

Yet we must come to the tropical Pacific to see how beautiful the 
human form may be. As Wilkes wrote, " I have scarcely seen a finer 
looking set of men than composed the suite of Tanoa" (King of Fiji) ; 
and Miss Gordon Gumming spoke truly when she said that no English 
duchess bore herself with greater dignity and graciousness of mien 
than did the ladies of the royal family of Mbau. 

In many another trait do they show their kinship to the universal 
feminine. Wilkes attempted to entertain the Queen of Eewa and her 
maids of honor on the Yincennes, but nothing seemed to please, and 
the piarty was evidently drifting into failure until, upon a whispered 
word from the Queen, all became animated and lively expressions of 
delight changed the entire tone of the afternoon. It transpired later 
that the Queen had commanded her suite to " act as if pleased." 

Their scantiness of attire serves but to reveal the beauty of their 



6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

forms. Indeed, we must recall the fact that even in cannibal days the 
Fijians would never expose the entire body, for such immodesty would 
have merited death at the hands of the chief, and in 1827 the natives 
of Levuka sent off a deputation to protest to Captain Dumont d'Urville 
against the indecency of his sailors in entering the ocean stripped of 
clothing. Dress has little or nothing to do with morality; indeed, 
among savage people the more clothing they are forced to assume the 
lower do their morals decline. Dressed in his simple waist-cloth, the 
Fijian is ready at any moment to seek the deep pools of some cool 
mountain stream in which to bathe. As civilization introduces clothing, 
so does this practice of swimming decline, and the once cleanly native 
becomes the prey of filth-diseases. Fortunately, the British Govern- 
ments of Papua and Fiji have not insisted upon the hat, shirt and 
trousers for the men, or the ugly "mother hubbards" for the women, 
which the missionaries have forced upon thenlatives of nearly all other 
groujDS in the Pacific, to the detriment of both health and morals. 

As James Chalmers, the great missionary to Papua, wrote in 1885^ 

Syphilis and strong drink have received the blame for the deterioration 
and extinction of native races, but I think the introduction of clothing has done 
much in this direction. To swathe their limbs in European clothing spoils 
them, deteriorates them, and I fear hurries them to premature death. Put 
excessive clothing with syphilis and strong drink and I think we shall be 
nearer the truth. Eetain native customs as much as possible — only those which 
are very objectionable should be forbidden^and leave it to the influence of 
education to raise them to purer and more civilized customs. 

The Polynesians of Samoa, Hawaii, Tahiti and ISTew Zealand had 
a lyric history sung by priests and sagas which told of days when the 
ancestors of their chiefs were gods, but the Melanesian race has little 
of this mytholog}^, and there is no "history" in Fiji, where, according 
to Wilkes, all are said to have descended from a single pair, whom the 
gods made black and wicked and to whom they gave but little clothing. 
Then the gods made the brown-skinned Tongans who behaved better 
and to whom they gave more clothing, and, last of all, the Avhite men 
were created, and these were well behaved and were given much cloth- 
ing. There are apparently no myths of ancient migrations, and the 
people are said always to have lived in Fiji. 

There is no history of the group as a whole, for war was the one chief 
object of Fiji, and each little district was forever suspicious of its neigh- 
bors. Indeed, to such a degree did the Fijians carry their zest for war 
that two men would walk abreast, never one behind the other, for the 
temptation of the man behind to club his companion might at any 
moment become irresistible. It was death to pass behind a chief or to 

1 ' ' James Chalmers, His Autobiography and Letters, ' ' pp. 255-256, by 
Eiehard Lovett, London, 1902. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI *<- 



COS. his shaaow, or the shadow of his house, ^o Fijian revenge wa^ 

assuaged until the enemy was eaten; indeed, so natural does this seem 

::em that a high chief ashed me in a easual -'^"^^ ^-^ 

the United States had eaten the Spaniards whom we had killed durmg 

*'^rdeiraecount of the eeaseless native w.s Is give^ by the 
Reverend Joseph Waterhouse in "The limg and People of F.ji and 
by Williams in his faseinating "Fi]! and the Fijians, ^nd they 
e Records of treachery, murder, cruelty and --' ™f -f/„ 
r ^ nf n <;infTle fislit for principle or an act ot meicy or 
MvaTrr n a h sto^tere'have bee'n few'instances of higher courage 
fidely and devotion to their creed than those furnished by the In-es 
the arly missionaries to these islands, and nowhere in the Pacifi has 
converl accomplished more good and in the process done less harm 

^'^Tr^d^lSln states that in former times the island of Mbengha was 
dominant in native affairs, and its chiefs still style themselves Qal - 
, HTnri" "subiect only to heaven "; finally, however, the chief of 
S™a ; ^quered Xngha'and slaughtered nearly all its inhabitants 
anrthen in 1800, the village of Verata on Viti Levu beeame dominan 
n F ian affairs. At this time, Mbanuvi, who had succeeded his father 
"ailatil, v^as the head chief of the town of Mban, u h^ s«.n 
thereafter died and was succeeded by his son, Na Ulivou (The Hot 

"""mIAi is a little island, not a mile in width, which lies oft the south- 
eastern corner of the great island of Viti Levu, of which indeed it is a 
m re ontlyer being connected with the mainland at low tide by a nat- 
Tral caulw y. Yet this insignificant islet of a single hill, surrounded 
byshallow mangrove flats and reefs, was destined to conquer nearly 

'''"inSnth seas that chief who first obtained the aid of white men 
in the use of firearms gained a rapid and terrible ascendency It so 
happened that in 1809 the armed brig Eliza was wrecked on the cora 
reef oft Nairai, which was a dependency of Mban, and the natives 
plundered the vessel. A Swede, named Charley Savage, and three com- 
panions made their way to the shore, and Savage was he firs whi 
man to come to Mbau. Here it is not improbable that he would h v 
been killed and eaten in accordance with Fijian custom r-P/f^g «^^ 

shipwrecked, had he not bethought himself of a musket which had been 
left on board, and requested the natives to search for it. They found 

it, built into the palisade surrounding a native village and soon Na- 

TJlivou saw in Savage and his musket the means to world-wide 

conquests. 



62 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



Verata, which was only eight miles from Mbau, was then the 
strongest j^ower in Fiji, dominating the villages for about ten miles 
along the shore of Viti Levu, but Mbau, aided by this base imitator of 
Cham^^lain, soon stripped it of its dependencies, leaving to its chief only 
his native village. Savage caused the natives to construct an arrow- 
proof sedan chair, within which he remained comfortably seated firing 
through an opening, and this contrivance was carried into battle while 
he terrified and slaughtered the impotent enemies of Mbau. For his 
share of the spoils of conquest Savage demanded women, and he is 
said to have acquired a hundred wives. JSTa-IIlivou heaped honors and 
titles upon him and gave him for his principal wife a chieftainess of 
the highest rank, but her children were strangled for reasons of state 
polity, so that after his death he was survived by but a single daughter. 

For two years Mbau enjoyed a monopoly of firearms in Fiji, and 




ItATu i;i;.\i Tanoa and his Wife Adi Cakabau in their House at Navuso. Viti 
Levu Island, Fiji, in 1899. They are cousins, both being members of the Koyal 
Family of Fiji. The screen is a large piece of Taviuni tapa. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 63 

conquered all the neighboring islands and overran the eastern and 
southern coasts of Yiti Levu. Finally, in 1813, the Mbauan conquests 
were pushed as far as Mbua in the southwestern part of Viti Levu, 
where in a fierce battle the ammunition of Savage and his white com- 
panions became exhausted, and they were forced to retreat to a small 
island in the river, where they were surrounded by thousands of howling 
enemies engaged in devouring the bodies of the fallen warriors of Mbau. 
Savage went to the water's edge to treat for terms of surrender, where 
he was captured, drowned and eaten, and his leg bones made into sail 
needles, while other parts of his skeleton were ground into powder to 
be drunk in Yaqona.^ 

In 1814, JSTa-Ulivou and his warriors again came to Mbua with a 
great fleet of war-canoes, and wreaked terrible vengeance upon those 
who had killed their champion Savage. For long years after this no 
native would pass the spot where Savage died without first plucking 
some leaves and casting them upon the ground; for, as Williams says 
the Fijian peoples with invisible beings every remarkable spot: the lonely dell, 
the gloomy cave, the desolate rock, and the deep forest. Many of these he be- 
lieves are on the alert to do him harm; therefore in passing their territory he 
throws down a few green leaves to propitiate the demon of the place. 

In the South Seas the most dreaded ghost is that of the man who seeks 
revenge for having been murdered and devoured. 

Early in his reign a powerful conspiracy arose against Na-Ulivou, 
but he drove the rebel chiefs from Mbau and also from Eewa, whither 
they had retreated, and finally he pursued them to Somo Somo on 
Taviuni, whence they fled to the distant island of Lakemba, whither 
he met them in a great sea fight and they were utterly annihilated. 
After this, Na-Ulivou assumed the title of Vunivalu (root of war), and 
he reigned the greatest chief in Fiji until his death in 1829. 

Eewa, however, remained independent of Mbau, and indeed until the 
group was annexed to Great Britain these two villages were rivals al- 
most constantly at war. 

In about 1804 a number of convicts who had escaped from Aus- 
tralia settled upon Eewa and were protected by its chief, and the aid 
rendered by these reprobates Avas sufficient to prevent Mbau from con- 
quering Eewa, Even in Fiji, where cruelty, treachery, cannibalism and 
ferocity were considered virtues, some of these men are still remem- 
bered as monsters of iniquity. In a few years they had nearly all killed 
one another or fallen in native wars, and only one, Paddy Connel, called 
Berry by the Fijians, survived until 1841, and served as guide, pilot 
and interpreter to Wilkes during the surveying operations of the United 
States Exploring Expedition in 1840. This man became thoroughly 
Fijianized, having the traditional hundred wives and forty-eight chil- 

2 The "kava" of Samoa. ^ 



64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

dren, and so great was his influence that the chief of Rewa would 
always roast and eat any man who incurred Connel's displeasure. In- 
deed, if native accounts are to be trusted, Connel was himself a can- 
nibal. All travelers in the Pacific will agree that the most vicious 
savage is not the native, but the degenerate white who has violated his 
birthright to civilization. 

When Na-Ulivou of Mbau died, he was succeeded by his brother 
Tanoa (kava bowl), who reigned for twenty-three troubled years, and 
died a cannibal and a heathen in 1852. 

Soon after Tanoa's accession, a powerful faction in Mbau decided to 
make war upon Rewa. This Tanoa was desirous of preventing, for 
he was Vasu (nephew) to Rewa, his mother having been a chief taincss 
of this place. This gave him the right to seize and appropriate to his 
own use alm.ost anything he desired from Rewa, where he was treated 
with a respect bordering upon religious adoration ; for whenever he vis- 
ited his mother's district the people would salute him with clapping of 
hands and shouting "Hail good is the coming hither of our noble lord 
nepbew." 

Naturally he was well disposed toward Rewa and he treacherously 
aided them while ostensibly prosecuting the war. This enraged the 
Mbau chiefs and they drove him into exile, where he remained five years, 
but finally in 1837 with the aid of his son Seru (afterwards called 
Thakombau) he reconquered his native village, and in a fiendish orgy 
dismembered his captives, roasting and eating their tongues, arms and 
legs while they still lived. 

Beneath every post of his house in Mbau a slave was buried when 
his new canoes were launched they were rolled into the water over the 
bodies of living victims who, after being crushed, were roasted and 
eaten, and when the canoe took to the water men were slain upon its 
deck so that it might be baptized in blood. When he sailed, he ran 
down all in his path, often capturing the victims for his cannibal feasts, 
for it was the rule in Fiji that all who were upset or wrecked were 
regarded as sacrifices to the gods. Indeed, the gods of Fiji were them- 
selves cannibal ghosts of dead chiefs and fed upon the spirits of those 
who were sacrificed. 

Wilkes gives a description of the coming of Tanoa to a conference 
held upon the U. S. S. Vincennes in August, 1840; 

The eanoe of Tanoa, the king of Mbau, was discovered rounding the southern 
point of the island of Ovalau ; it presented a magnificent appearance with its 
immense sail of white mats; the pennants streaming from its yard denoting it 
as belonging to some great chief. It was a fit accompaniment to the magnifi- 
cent scenery around, and advanced rapidly and gracefully along; it was a single 
canoe, one hundred feet in length, with an outrigger of large size ornamented 
with two thousand five hundred of the Cyprgea ovula shells; its velocity was 
almost inconceivable, and every one was struck with the adroitness with which 
it was managed and landed upon the beach. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 65 

Often when Tanoa returned to Mbau from his murderous raids children 
yet alive were to be seen suspended by an ankle or wrist from the yard- 
arm of this canoe, and so common was this practise that such were 
called in derision Mianu-manu-ni-latha (birds of the sail). 

The later years of this inhuman monster were disturbed by dissen- 
tions and by the rebellions of his sons. Yet when he came to die he 
smiled with his last breath when told that five of his wives were to be 
strangled to accompany him into the world beyond. 

Throughout his reign, Eewa and Mbau were almost constantly at 
war, but every now and then Tanoa would command the Rewa chiefs to 
come to Mbau to beg pardon for their temerity, which they always did, 
even if victorious. 

Tanoa lived to be nearly if not quite eighty years of age, a rare oc- 
currence in Fiji, for they believed that as they were at the time of death 
so would they be in the world to come. Thus doubly did they dread the 
infirmities of age, and people who passed middle life commonly re- 
quested their nearest relative and friends to strangle or bury them alive. 
Thus died the great chief Tuithakau (king of the reefs) of Somo somo, 
an event of which the missionary Williams gives a detailed and graphic 
description. Tuithakau was described by Commodore Wilkes as 
a fine specimen of a Fiji Islander; bearing no slight resemblance to our ideas 
of an old Roman. His figure was particularly tall and manly and he had a head 
fit for a monarch. He looks as if he were totally distinct from the scenes 
of horror that are daily taking place around him, and his whole countenance has 
the air and expression of benevolence. 

In August, 1845, this old aristocrat became feeble after prolonged 
illness, and one day he announced to those around him that the time of 
his death had come. Two of his wives were then adorned in gala attire 
and strangled by their kindred, while the old king was covered with 
charcoal pigment, the chieftain's turban of masi placed upon his head, 
and a string of whale's teeth around his neck. Then the chief priest 
blew two blasts upon his triton shell, and after an interval turning to 
the old king's son he said "True the sun of one king has set, but our 
king yet lives." Then the aged man was carried out through an open- 
ing torn through the wall of the house, as is the custom to-day at Fijian 
funerals, and they placed him upon the bodies of his two dead wives 
who lay upon the mats within the grave, and as the earth was thrown 
over him he was heard to cough beneath the ground. Sixty of his sub- 
jects then cut off their little fingers, fastened them upon reeds and 
thrust them into the thatch along the eaves of the dead chief's house. 
So respected was this custom of burying the aged that for a wliole 
3^ear at Somo Somo the missionaries heard of but one natural death of 
an adult, and Wilkes says that among over 200 natives at Savu Savu he 
saw not one over forty years of age. 



[Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxxvii, No. 1, pp. 31-49, 

July, 1915. 



A HISTOEY OF FIJI, II 

Bx ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

THE CAENEGIB INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON 

"ryPOlSr the death of old Tanoa, his son Thakombau (evil to Mbau) 
v-J became Vunivalu. He was an ambitious, energetic, crafty and 
intelligent man, but the problems of government were becoming yearly 
more complex in Fiji. 

Missionaries had entered the group in 1835, and although Tanoa 
did not permit them to live in Mbau or to attempt to make converts of 
his subjects, other chiefs welcomed them, for they brought valuable 
presents and increased the importance of those among whom they lived. 
Gradually other white men had come to Fiji. At first mere degen- 
erates or deserters from vessels who lived as did the natives themselves, 
but afterwards men of more ambition and intelligence gathered to the 
shores of these distant islands, and assumed a leading part in affairs. 
The missionary influence was beginning to be felt, for converts were 
being made among the lower orders of the population, and the power 
of the native priests, and with it that of the chiefs was weakening. 

Vainly did Thakombau rail against the advance of civilization, for 
the hated power of the Mbau chief, founded as it was upon terrorism, 
was doomed. One after another defeats came to the war parties of 
Thakombau, and so reduced was he at last that, the missionaries being 
the sole power left to whom he could appeal for aid, he was forced in 
1854 to profess Christianity, and cannibal feasts were known no more 
at Mbau. It was a great triumph for the missionaries, the result of 
nineteen years of unremitting toil amid constant dangers and surround- 
ings unspeakable in horror. 

That Thakombau's conversion was forced upon him as a matter of 
expediency is evident, for in a speech he called upon the gods of Fiji, 
saying that he still respected them as of old, but that the time had come 
when he must add the white man's god to those of his ancestors. 

In the days of his power he had owned a fleet of more than a hun- 
dred war canoes, manned by a thousand warriors. 15,000 subjects 
acknowledged him as king, and in addition half of Fiji paid him tribute 
or admitted his supremacy, and he had boasted that the cannibal ovens 
of Mbau never grew cold. He had more than fifty wives, and he him- 
self knew not how many children, and when but a child he had wan- 

66 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 67 

tonly murdered one of his pla.ymates ; yet he had but to declare himself 
a Christian and hundreds of his subjects followed the chief's example 
as Fijian custom demanded. Indeed, even to-day whenever a high chief 
stumbles and falls all in his neighborhood must tumble like checkers 
in a row, and, if he takes medicine, his subjects clamor for some of the 
same sort. 

We must not assume that all or even that most of the Fijians were 
hypocrites in thus following their chief. For years the zealous spirit 
of the missionaries had been at work among them and they had gained 
the hearts of many of the poor and downtrodden, especially of the 
women, upon whom the tyranny of savage days fell with a heavy hand. 
It was the high chief and the warrior classes who had most to lose 
through the levelling democracy of Christianity which denied their 
divine right to rule through tabu, abolished their polygamy, discour- 
aged war, prohibited cannibalism and in every way lessened their author- 
ity and rendered ridiculous the proud traditions of their caste. While 
the high chief remained unconverted, the missionary's lot was happy in 
that he well could be the kind and simple friend of the distressed and 
the brotherly adviser of the troubled, but with the conversion his tem- 
poral power became paramount, for it was impossible for him to escape 
the difficult double role of leader in secular as well as religious affairs, 
and thus the simple-minded lover of mankind was suddenly exalted into 
the position of the vicar of the terrible god of the white man whose favor 
was hard to win and whose punishments were eternal. 

It is but fair to the missionaries to recognize that their temporal 
power was at the outset forced upon them, and that the mistakes which 
they have at times fallen into are those which overshadow the spiritual 
function of the clergy in all states wherein the government has fallen 
under the domination of the priesthood. 

It was indeed fortunate for Fiji that the missionaries had been 
obliged to labor for nineteen long and almost hopeless years, and to en- 
deavor in every way to understand and endear themselves to the people 
before any of the important chiefs had yielded to their teaching. 

Everywhere in the Pacific where missionary success was quickly and 
easily attained, results more or less disastrous to the natives had fol- 
lowed. Despite many notable and glorious exceptions such as Chalmers 
of Papua, the old type of missionary was too often predisijosed to re- 
gard all customs not his own as " heathen," hence pernicious. Thus if 
his success was immediate, as in Hawaii, his well-meant zeal impelled 
him too quickly to overthrow old customs and at once to force upon his 
converts a semblance of the habits of his own stratum of European 
society. 

In this connection it should, however, be said that the blame for 
most of the bigotry, which has been all too evident, especially in former 



68 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

times, should fall but lightly if at all upon the field worker who, living 
among the natives, comes to love them as his friends and at least deals with 
them as individuals; but the fault lies chiefly with the home boards, 
who, not realizing the paramount importance of local conditions in 
treating with primitive peoples, have attempted to enforce almost the 
same set of regulations from Greenland's icy mountains to Africa's 
coral strand. 

The missionary, whether he would or no, is forbidden to conduct 
marriages between heathen and Christians, and too often one party to 
the contract must enter upon it with a lie upon his or her lips. The 
hypocrisy and espionage which results from sharing with the informer, 
or the chief, the fines derived from those who smoke, or swear, or work 
upon a Sunday, may well be imagined, and moreover, altogether too 
large a share of the earned wealth of the natives is demanded from 
them, the revenues of the church in certain groups being decidedly 
larger than the taxes collected by the civil government. 

Yet let us not blind ourselves to an appreciation of the fundamental 
good the missions have accomplished, for whether Christianity be true 
or false, the natives must live under the rule of a people actuated by 
its motives and its faith, and are thus through its acquisition ines- 
timably better fitted to resist the evil that preys upon them with the 
advent of "civilization," 

In Fiji, however, the natives had become thoroughly known to the 
missionaries before the great conversion of 1854, and many old customs 
were thus permitted to remain which would have been suppressed had 
the missionary, and the political farty which inevitably springs up 
around him, came more quickly into power. 

The power of the missionary, after the great chiefs cast in their 
lot with him, is indeed terrible for good or evil, and in Tonga and later 
in Fiji he connived at the arming of the natives in order to conquer 
"converts." As the struggling priest of a great religion the mission- 
ary inspires all respect, but as the crafty politician or bigoted inquisitor 
his actions become correspondingly reprehensible. Too often in those 
early days of missionary endeavor he seemed satisfied with a mere 
semblance of order and religion for this was the period in which faith 
rather than good works was deemed essential. To the natives he too 
often remained one of a foreign race — a wizard, terrible, mysterious 
and implacable. Happily, a change has come over the thought of the 
world, and the conditions we describe are not those of to-day. 

Henceforth Thakombau was to remain nominally king in Fiji, but 
the real power was vested in the white men who had settled upon his 
shores. He had escaped the retribution of native revenge only to 
struggle hopelessly in the net of commercialism and diplomacy. It was 
a sad and disappointing period between the time of the conversion in 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 69 

1854 and the annexation to Great Britain in 1874, Soon after Thakom- 
bau "lotued^^^ in 1854, a powerful faction in Mbau rebelled and fled 
to Eewa where they arrayed themselves under the banner of the great 
chief Eatu Quara or Tui Dreketi (the Hungry Woman or the Long 
Fellow), a famous warrior and an implacable enemy of Thakombau 
who threatened to destroy Mbau and to kill and eat its king in revenge 
for the burning of Eewa in 1847. At one time only a single Tongan 
and a missionary guarded Thakombau in his house at Mbau, but, at 
this critical juncture, an American ship under Captain Dunn arrived 
and, aided by the missionaries, Thakombau and his party were enabled 
to ]uirchase gims and ammunition. Eewa might still have conquered, 
however, had it not been that Eatu Quara died of dysentery in Jan- 
uary, 1855. 

Indeed, as the Eeverend Mr. Waterhouse states, the people of Mbau 
grew to hate Christianity after Thakombau had professed it to be his 
religion. The Fijians had a highly developed system of constitutional" 
government, which varied somewhat with the locality, but was nowhere 
an absolute despotism. In fact the influence of unprincipled white 
men and the introduction of firearms led to conquests which had done 
more to exalt the power of a few chiefs and to develop the worst ex- 
crescences of the social and religious system of Fiji than had any 
other factor. 

At Mbau there were two high chiefs, the head priest of Eoko Tui 
(the reverenced king) who was above all in rank and was held in re- 
ligious veneration but took no part in war or political affairs; and the 
Vunivalu (root of war), the executive head of the tribe. Upon the 
death of the Vunivalu, his successor was elected from among his rela- 
tives by the land-owners and chiefs of the tribe, and should he fail to 
carry out their policy they refused to provide him with food. 

After white men came and the lust for conquest overpowered all 
else at Mbau, their ancestral veneration for the Eoko Tui declined, 
and the Vunivalu beeame correspondingly more powerful. Thus 
Thakombau was not the Mikado but the Tycoon of his people. 

But to return to the historic narrative: King George Tubou of 
Tonga, the most powerful Christian convert in the Pacific, came to the 
aid of Thakombau in 1855, and for the moment reestablished his su- 
premacy, but at the same time he acquired a knowledge of Thakombau's 
weakness, and became convinced that a Tongan conquest of Fiji was 
possible. 

For generations the Tongans had been in the habit of sailing to 
Lakemba, Kambara, and other islands of the Lau group in Fiji, where 
the forests afforded large trees for the making of canoes. A year or 

3 Assumed tlie waist-elotli wliicli the missionaries obliged all converts to 



70 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

more would be employed in canoe building, and thus the newcomers had 
learned Fijian customs and acquired an interest in the political affairs 
of the islands. Finally they began to overrun and conquer the Fijians 
and were the cause of much disorder and distress. 

In about 1848 a powerful rebellion headed by Maafu the cousin 
of the Christian king broke out in Tonga, but was suppressed by George 
Tubou. Maafu, its leader, was exiled to Fiji and it was intimated 
to him that if he desired a kingdom it was his to conquer. 

Of the highest Tongan birth, young, ambitious, of superb physiqiie, 
energetic and in every sense a leader among men of action, Maafu came 
to Fiji and at once became the ruler of all Tongans in the group. 

His policy was to assist the weaker Fijian chiefs at war with stronger 
enemies, and then the combined Tongan and Fijian army having been 
victorious, he would turn upon his erstwhile allies and overpower them. 
Thus he gained a foothold at Vanua Mbalavu and from this as a base 
he proceeded to conquer the Fijis. As Seeman says in his account of 
his Government Mission to Fiji : 

Where Maafu and his hords had been it was as if a host of locusts had 
descended. 

Famine and poverty stalked in his wake, yet wherever he went there was 
a Tongan " teacher " by his side ; and, as Seeman says, 

the Wesleyan missionaries were kept quiet by Maafu making it the first condi- 
tion in arranging articles of peace that the conquered should renounce heathen- 
ism and become Christians. 

There is a strange silence in missionary accounts respecting Maafu, 
for not once does his name appear in Calvert's "Missionary Labors 
among the Cannibals" published in 1870, yet he added hundreds of 
" converts " to their flocks, and the Tongans and missionaries remained 
upon the best of terms; and only after the treachejous and brutal tor- 
ture and massacre of prisoners at Katakala* and Naduri were the 
missionaries forced by outraged public opinion to wash their hands of 
Maafu and join weakly in the protest against Tongan cruelty. It 
seems almost incomprehensible that this sad and revolting abuse of 
power should have been exhibited by the missionaries in the part they 
took in conniving at native warfare in Tonga Tahiti, and Fiji in order 
that their reports to the home mission might "glow with the glorious 
story of conversions." 

By 1858 there were but two great chiefs left in Fiji, Maafu and 
Thakombau, and the two powers were face to face. Doubtless the mis- 
sionaries would have had their own way more readily with Maafu, for 
when they had suggested to Thakombau the abolition of the old sys- 
tem and the establishment of a "constitutional monarchy," he had 

4 See William T. Pritchard, 1866 ; Polynesian reminiscences, pp. 225-234. 
London. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 7 1 

answered "I was born a chief and a chief I will die." Nevertheless 
he was finally forced into yielding to the demands of the white men. 
Thus Maafu " the Christian " would doubtless have conquered Mbau and 
become king of all Fiji had not Thakombau in 1858 signed a deed of 
cession granting his possessions to Great Britain. The British consul, 
William Pritchard, Esq., and a warship came to his aid, and Maafu 
was checked; and although the negotiations with England came to 
nought, the increasing immigration of Europeans to Fiji made native 
warfare more and more infrequent. Maafu had to content himself 
with only a partial realization of his ambition and in 1882 he died a 
disappointed man. Had he commenced his operations five years sooner, 
he would have become the conquerer of Fiji. It was the hand of Great 
Britain, not that of the missionaries, that had checked his blood stained 
career. 

The affair which caused Thakombau most serious trouble appears 
to have been one of those extortions which have been so frequently 
perpetrated by a "civilized" upon a simple people. On July 4, 1849, 
the residence of a whiter trader named Williams, then serving as United 
States consul in Fiji, was burned and the natives stole some of the fur- 
niture and stores while the house was in flames. Thakombau does not 
appear to have been personally responsible for the firing of the house, 
but the natives of Mbau in which the incident occurred were subject to 
him, and Williams demanded from Thakombau about $3,000 as in- 
demnity. Upon the king's refusing to pay, the consul's demands were 
gradually increased and other claimants appeared, so that finally, having 
secured the cooperation of the United States government, the sum of 
$45,000 was demanded. Utterly unable to meet this "indemnity," 
harassed at home, and threatened from abroad, it seemed to simple 
Thakombau an intervention of Providenece when certain money-lenders 
from Australia offered to pay the claim of the United States in con- 
sideration of the deeding to them of 200,000 acres of the best land 
in Fiji. It may well be imagined that only for a brief moment was 
his kingly head allowed to rest in peace. Poor Thakombau, and with 
him all Fiji, had indeed fallen "into the hands of the Jews," and it 
was a happy moment when, on October 10, 1874, he signed a document 
which read, "We, King of Fiji, together with other high chiefs of Fiji, 
hereby give our country, Fiji, unreservedy to her Britannic Majesty, 
Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. And we trust and repose fully 
in her that she will rule Fiji justly and affectionately, that we may 
continue to live in peace and prosperity." Never was the confidence of 
a poor and degraded people better requited by a rich and civilized one, 
for a strong, and generous hand had come to rule in Fiji and the light 
of a happier day dawned upon the oppressed. Sir Arthur Gordon 
(afterwards Lord Stanmore) was the first British governor. He had 



72 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

witnessed the cruelties of the disastrous native war in Kew Zealand, 
and knew full well how difficult it is to graft a European civilization 
upon a Polynesian stock. Fortunately there were high-principled men 
to whom he could turn for advice^, and he did well in seeking the coun- 
cils of Mr. John Thurston, long a resident in Fiji. 

The annual poll tax of £1 per man and 4s. per woman which 
Thakombau's government had imposed was working ruin and death in 
Fiji. It was impossible for the natives to earn so large a sum, but the 
white planters eagerly paid the taxes and then "indentured" the 
wretched creatures, who were forced to work upon the plantations of 
their white masters at a wage so low that they toiled for 280 days in 
the year simply to repay the tax which the planter had paid to the 
government. Thus were the Fijians being entrapped into a bitter and 
unnatural bondage more merciless than the orgies of the worst period 
of cannibal days. 

But Sir Arthur Gordon and Mr. Thurston soon tore loose the 
shackles of the slaves, despite the angry protests and threats of the 
whites in Fiji. Their plan was that each district be obliged to main- 
tain a garden of copra, cotton, candle-nuts, tobacco, coffee or other 
produce, or to supplement this by the manufacture of mats or other 
articles of trade, and at the end of each year the products were 
to be sold under government supervision to the highest bidder and 
any money received over and above that of the district tax was to be 
returned to the district itself and divided among the taxpayers. This 
simple plan, which closely accords with their ancient manner of rais- 
ing tribute, has encouraged industry among the natives, shielded them 
from the avarice of traders, secured to them their lands, and each year 
produced a sum considerably in excess of the taxes. ^ 

Excellent as this plan was, it remained deficient in one important 
respect, for the government made no effort to establish manual-training 
schools wherein old crafts might be improved and new ones developed. 
Education in Fiji has been confined to religion and the "three E's," 
and inspiring as it is to witness the son of a cannibal extracting cube 
roots and solving quadratic equations, one inclines to the opinion that 
the prodigy's future life would be better assured of a career of useful 
service to the world and of happiness to himself had he been taught to 
be a good carpenter, mason, farmer or decorator. It is certainly un- 
fortunate that, having ingeniously created a market for the products 
of Fijian labor, the English failed to improve the earning capacity 
of the natives, thus losing an unique opportunity to stimulate an in- 
terest in the useful arts that might soon have obliterated the apathy 
of the downcast race. 

5 Eecently some of the districts have been permitted, subject to consent of 
the Governor, to pay their tax in money. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 7 3 

Mr. Thurston, the originator of the new system of taxation, had 
■come to Fiji as a common sailor before the mast, but he lived to be 
Governor of Fiji from 1888 to 1896, and died as Sir John Thurston, 
universally beloved by the race for whose uplifting he had contended 
so courageously and well, and thus in Fiji there live to-day the hap- 
piest, the most law-abiding and potentially the most nearly civilized 
natives in the Pacific. It is one of the very few instances wherein a 
powerful and enlightened race have studied and toiled through many 
unrequited years to lift to a happier level a poor and barbarous people. 

There is no longer in Fiji that painful contrast of which Wilkes 
complained between the beauty of the island scenery and the character 
of the inhabitants, for consistently in all respects the archipelago is now 
one of the fairest spots within the tropic world. 

Nowhere in the Pacific did old customs change more slowly under 
European rule than in Fiji, for it has been the consistent policy of the 
British government to leave unaltered all that was good in the manners 
of old days. 

The villages are almost as they were before the white man came, 
•only the log stockades and the encircling moats have disappeared during 
the long years of peace, and the houses are no longer perched upon the 
summits of serie cliffs, but now cluster along the river-banks or under 
the cocoa palms of the seashore. The high-peaked Mbures or temples, 
once such a picturesque feature, have fallen into decay with the advent 
of Christianity, although one thinks they might well have been pre- 
served, enlarged and converted into Christian churches, for the taste- 
ful sennit patterns which adorned their beams and rafters would have 
made the chapel the most attractive house in the village instead of 
being, as it too often is, a cheerless barn-like structure, ill-proportioned 
without and barren within. 

The better types of native houses are set upon artificial embank- 
ments of stones and earth, sometimes twenty feet high, as in the valley 
of the Eewa Eiver, where floods may be expected. The framework is of 
tree fern or cocoanut logs, ingeniously lashed together, and the sides 
and roof are covered with a thick thatch of wild cane, or cocoanut 
leaves spread over ferns. The roof is quite thin at the peak, but is 
fully a foot and a half thick at the eaves, where it projects slightly, 
and is cut off squarely, presenting a very neat appearance. The ground- 
plan of the house is usually rectangular, not oval at its ends, as in 
Tahiti, and the peaked roof has a long ridge-pole which projects several 
feet beyond the eaves and, if the residence be that of a chief, is thickly 
studded with white Cyprcea cowrie shells, and sometimes other cowrie 
shells are strung upon ropes of cocoanut fiber sennit and hung pendant 
from the projecting ridge-pole. There are no windows, but several 
openings serve as doors and may in time of rain be closed with mats. 



74 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

The floor is covered with several layers of pendamu mats, and a raised 
dais at one end of the single room serves as a bed and may be screened 
by mosquito-proof curtains of masi (tapa). A rectangular earth-cov- 
ered depression serves for the fireplace and the smoke escapes as best 
it may, the smoldering embers imparting always a pleasant aroma to 
the air. 

In speaking of everything Fijian, we must remember that the 
peoples of the Ea, or western islands of the Archipelago, and of the 
mountains, are of purer Papuan stock and are more primitive than 
those of the Vititonga race of the Lau group and the eastern coasts of 
the large island. Accordingly, the houses differ in different places, 
being smaller, more crudely and flimsily made among the Papuan than 
among the Vititonga tribes. Also in the western parts of the large 
islands and in the Ea islands, the chiefs are not so highly respected as 
among tribes whose blood has been mingled with the aristocratic Poly- 
nesian. At Mbau, the Eoko Tui was almost god-like in native estima- 
tion, whereas in the mountains of Viti Levu the chief was only the 
leading councilor of the tribe, and labored in the fields in common with 
his subjects. Indeed the Mbau chiefs looked down upon those of the 
western part of Viti Levu, calling them Kai-si (peasants). 

If the house were that of a high chief, as at Mbau or Eewa, the 
roof-beams were wrapped with interlacing strands of cocoanut fiber 
sennit, displaying a pattern in rich browns, black and yellow, so pleas- 
ingly contrasted that one is forced to regret that work of such high 
artistic merit should be suffered to remain in a house as inflammable 
as a haystack. Yet these houses withstand a hurricane far better than 
do the hideous corrugated-iron-roofed structures of Europeans. 

Several old wooden basins, yaqona bowls, are hung upon the wall, 
their naturally dark wood coated with pearly blue where many a brew- 
ing of the drink has stained them. Carved war-clubs and long elab- 
orately decorated spears may be seen suspended from the beams, and 
as the eye becomes accustomed to the dim light one beholds such treas- 
ures as a sperm whale's tooth strung as were old-fashioned powder 
horns upon a rope of cocoanut fiber and polished through repeated rub- 
bings with cocoanut oil until its surface is as brown as tinted meer- 
«eliaum. A few fly-brushes, pandamus fans for awakening the fire, a 
huge ceremonial war-fan of palm-leaf, some wooden food bowls, and 
crude cooking pots of fire-baked clay, and a clock that never goes, com- 
plete the list of the furniture. Yet one thing of painful memory one 
would fain have overlooked — the universal pillow. This consists of a 
block of wood or stick of bamboo supported upon legs so that it stands 
horizontally four or five inches above the floor. In old days when the 
hair was most elaborately dressed and trained into a huge mop, this 
pillow was doubtless a necessity, but in this shaven and shorn period of 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 75 

Chrisianity such an instrament of torture might well be dispensed with, 
although by the native it is still regarded as the acme of luxury. 

Housekeeping is simple in happy Fiji, where all is charmingly clean, 
and thick layers of soft mats invite repose upon the floor. Indeed the 
natives sleep much by day, for at night there is apt to be a "meke," 
wherein the maidens of the village, adorned in garlands of flowers and 
well polished with cocoanut oil, sing far into the small hours, keeping 
time to their chants by graceful gestures. This, together with the dull 
beating of the wooden drum, drives all hope of sleep away, but it is to 
be preferred to the "silent" nights when rats and mice scamper cease- 
lessly over the floor, contesting their supremacy with an occasional cen- 
tipede or land crab. Yes, one must live a life of leisure and sleep by 
day in Fiji. 

The largest edifice in the village is called the "stranger's house" 
for it is here that guests are entertained and fed by the community 
under orders from the chief. At Mbau the old stranger's house has 
stood for generations, dating far back into cannibal times, and within 
its walls the first Christian service was held in 1854. It is about 125 
feet long and 40 feet wide, being exceeded in length only by the 
stranger's house at Eewa. 

Carpenters are a highly respected caste in Fiji, and canoe and house 
building are occupations fit to engage the activities of chiefs. When 
one desires a house, a whale's tooth or other suitable gift should be 
presented to the chief, who then engages the carpenters, who in turn 
may command the services of more than two hundred assistants, all of 
whom labor so efficiently that in from one to three weeks the house is 
erected and ready for company. In the South Seas things are done 
in communal fashion and village labors, such as house building, canoe 
making, and the gathering of crops are occasions for songs and dances 
and all manner of merriment and feasting. 

There is much of interest in Mbau, for although the ovens have long 
ago grown cold, yet the great foundation stones of the old temple of 
the war god (ISTa Vatani Tawake) still remain in the center of the 
village, and in 1898 one could still see the sacred tree upon whose 
boughs were hung the genital organs of victims who had been sacrificed 
to the Fijian Mars. 

Close by the side of the foundation of the old temple a sharp-edged 
column of basalt is set upright within the ground. This is the stone to 
which victims were dragged by their arms and upon which their heads 
were dashed. Fragments of human teeth might still be found by dig- 
ging at the base of this stone, and in many a house in Mbau there were 
sail needles made from leg-bones of the victims. There was another 
execution stone which was axe-shaped and thrust upright into the 
ground near the foot of the hill ; but this now serves as the baptismal 
font, and is set within the church. The ovens in which victims were 



76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

cooked upon the hillside lay near this stone, as were also the great hol- 
low log-drums, the "publishers of war" whose rolling beat the cannibal 
call in old days, and one of which now serves to summon worshippers 
to church. 

An interesting trophy of old days was the anchor of the French 
brig Aimahle Josephine which now lies close to the side of the founda- 
tion of the temple. This vessel was treacherously cut off at Mbau on 
the night of July 19^ 1834, her captain and most of the crew being 
murdered. Native wars were waged over the joossession of this trophy, 
the final resting place of which is Mbau. 

The corner posts of the house of old Tanoa were still to be seen, 
and when natives pass these in the night they pluck green leaves and 
cast them upon the earth, for beneath the ground by the side of each 
post and embracing it with his arms there stands the skeleton of a 
victim who was buried alive. 

The abutment of the sea wall of Mbau with its made-land, and docks 
built of large flat stones, is a remarkable example of native engineering, 
being surpassed only by the canal of the Eewans near Nakelo. Huge 
canoes, some of them with bows studded with white Cyprcea shells, lie 
stranded here and there. The native houses are scattered over the 
made-land and along the gentle slope at the base of the hill, leaving the 
summit barren as of old, although here overlooking the city stands the 
residence of the Methodist missionary, and the graves of Tanoa and 
of Thakombau, the latter of whom died in 1883. 

But exceeding all in interest was Eatu Epele Nailatikau, high chief 
of Fiji, son and successor of king Thakombau. Unreconciled to the 
presence of the white man, his memories harked far back to old days 
and beams covered with woven sennit, and in its treasures of old days, 
when his family were great and all-powerful in Fiji. Yet, though 
shorn of power, no king could have been treated with more respect by 
those around him than was he. 

His house in Mbau was a small one, in no way differing from those 
of the lesser chiefs, excepting in the richness of its Taviuni tapa screens, 
and beams covered with woven sennit, and in its treasures of old days ; 
the most notable of which was a well-oiled elephant's tusk beautifully 
browned and polished, which had lain upon the floor since the days of 
old Tanoa, who once prized it as the largest piece of " coin " in the 
world. Only the highest chiefs were permitted to enter his house, and 
even these dropped their titles and crouched silently against the wall 
awaiting his invitation ere they spoke. 

In his every expression and gesture there was a stately consciousness 
of his high-born ancestry. 

Although over sixty years of age, his finely muscular body still stood 
erect, with its dark bronze skin softened and smoothed through many 
a cocoanut-oil massage. Upon ceremonial occasions he blackened his 



78 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

face and covered his hair with lime. The little finger of his right 
hand had been severed at the first joint as an indication of mourning 
upon the death of his grandfather Tanoa. 

He was every inch a king seated in his chair with the noblest of 
his race crouching silently around him. Whenever he smoked a cigar 
he condescendingly nodded to some high chief who crawled humbly toward 
him on hands and knees, delighted at the honor of " finishing the butt." 

When he dined, a clean new mat was unrolled upon the floor, and 
then men and women came crawling in on hands and knees, bearing 
food for the god-like one, who sat tailor-fashion upon the floor. No 
commoner ate in the presence of the king, and least of all would the 
women of his household have presumed to such familiarity. The menu 
of one dinner at which the author was a guest consisted in an excellent 
fish chowder served in cocoanut bowls, and yams placed upon four-legged 
wooden platters, all scrupulously clean and cooked to tempt the palate 
of the most fastidious epicure. Our plates were banana leaves, and 
fingers served in lieu of knives and forks. Cups, etc., used by the 
king are tabu and must not be used by others. The courtiers remained 
silent while the meal was in progress, only softly clapping hands when 
the king addressed any of their number. After dinner a bowl of water 
was placed before the king and the natives again clapped respectfully 
while he washed his hands. 

Even before the advent of the white man, cooking was a high art in 
Fiji. In fact, these natives had little to learn from us in this direc- 
tion. Their pottery enabled them to boil or steam their food, and in 
addition they made use of the oven. This consists in a stone-lined pit 
within which a wood fire is made. Then, when the stones have become 
red hot the embers are raked away and the food; pigs, fish, vegetables, 
etc., are placed within the oven, having previously been wrapped in 
Tahitian chestnut or bread-fruit leaves, or in the case of man in the 
leaves of Solanum anthropophagorum, a plant allied to the potato. 
The food is then covered thickly with juicy green leaves which in turn 
are blanketed with earth. After a few hours all within the oven be- 
comes so thoroughly baked that the ribs of pigs may be torn off and the 
flesh eaten as in America we do corn upon the cob. 

Canoes laden with tribute (lala), for Eatu Epele were constantly 
arriving at Mbau. These offerings varied with the tribe, for each was 
charged to bring certain things. Thus one canoe might be laden with 
great bundles of yams, another with husked cocoanuts tied into bunches, 
or with yaqona root, turtles, masi, mats, etc. The greatest care was 
taken in the preparation of the tribute, and, in fact, the natives in- 
variably gave the best they had. 

Those who brought tribute carried it humbly to the door of the 
king's house and crouched close to the wall outside, softly and plead- 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 79 

ingly clapping with their hands. Hearing the plaintive sound two 
chiefs of the king's household, who had hitherto been sitting motionless 
as statues within the room, moved to one and the other side of the door. 
The head of a pig, a large bunch of coeoanuts, or a turtle would then 
be timidly thrust part way within the opening, and a tremulous voice 
outside would beg that his majesty, their great and gracious lord, would 
condescend to accept as tribute so mean and unworthy an offering as 
their poverty forced them to present, trusting that in his greatness he 
would continue to protect and show them favor. When the voice ceased, 
the two chiefs at the door would critically inspect the proffered speci- 
men of tribute, calling attention to its faults as well as to its qualities, 
and if its acceptance was recommended, all the chiefs who had been 
crouching sphinx-like against the wall within the house would show 
signs of life and majestically clapping their hands murmur " A ! woi ! 
woi ! woi!! A tabua levu!" (a wonderfully large whale's tooth!). 
Upon which the king himself usually spoke a few words and the tribute 
was formally accepted. So abundant was this tribute that great heaps 
of taro, yams, coeoanuts or turtles were nearly always to be seen upon 
the village green of Mbau. 

In the old days, wars were waged over the slightest inattention 
to this matter of tribute. The island of Maliki was charged to provide 
turtles for Tanoa, but one day they presumed themselves to eat one of 
the turtles they had caught ; hearing of which Tanoa sent a fleet of war 
canoes, and every man and woman on ]\Ialiki was killed, the children 
being captured in order that the boys of Mbau might club them to death 
and thus earn their titles of Koroi (killers of men). 

The old king spoke not a word of English, but he was fond of rem- 
iniscence. He remembered the Peacock of the Wilkes expedition, 
being then a boy of about 8 years. He also spoke admiringly of Pro- 
fessor Moseley, of the Challenger, and seemed saddened when told that 
he was dead. 

The freedom with which he volunteered to discourse upon events of 
cannibal times was surprising. He said that one day when he was a 
little boy he had entered the house of Tanoa during the dinner hour, 
and his grandfather, who always loved him, had given him the tongue 
of the Mbakola^ (man-to-be-eaten) and its taste was vinaka (good). 
After this he " often dined with his grandfather," who " had a new man 
nearly every day," Wilkes states that the Fijians esteemed women 
more highly than men, but Eatu Epele declared that the best of meat 
were old, lean men "whose flesh was red and whose fat was yellow," 
and whose taste was "like pork with bananas." Women, he declared, 

6 Long pig, ' ' Vuaka-mbalavu, ' ' applied to designate cooked man, is not 
grammatical Fijian, but is derived from a joke of the inveterate old cannibal 
Tanoa. 



8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

were " covered with a layer of fat " and white men he had been told were 
salty or flavored strongly with tobacco. In old days in Fiji, the highest 
praise one could bestow upon a dish was to liken it to a cooked man. 
When in Fiji, I several times overheard the remark "were it not for 
the English I would eat you," and in quarrelling the commonest slur 
is to call an antagonist (Mbakola) a man to be eaten. Our abhorrence 
of cannibalism, which is after all a sentimental matter in so far as the 
mere eating is concerned, was not shared by the old Fijians of expe- 
rience, for "men are good; indeed the best of all meat," and as Eatu 
Epele once said "he never met a man without thinking how he would 
taste." 

Some Fijian names for food are curious; thus bula-na-kau signifies 
beef, for when Captain Eagleston brought the two original cattle to 
Fiji he told the natives that the animals were a " bull and a cow." 

Eatu Epele delighted to play at draughts with a tawny-haired 
albino chief whose light skin was profusely bespeckled with brown 
blotches and whose eyes were dull blue. This chief's function seemed 
to be solely that of a messenger and draught player, and invariably the 
games were won by the king, for no matter how great an advantage the 
albino might win, he " committed suicide " at the last by placing all his 
pieces at the mercy of his lord and master. 

Eatu Epele, the most interesting chief in the Pacific, died in 1901, 
and with him there passed away the last champion of the old in Fiji. 
Born of the highest rank and to a life of war and action, fate had 
robbed him of his birthright and left him but dreams and memories. 
Like the lingering spark of a fire that can never burn again, this spirit 
of old cannibal days faded into oblivion. His son, the Honorable Eatu 
Kadavu Levu, who succeeded him as Eoko Tui Tailevu, has been care- 
fully educated under British auspices, and is a member of the Legis- 
lative council. 

The cleanliness of Fijian houses is remarkable, indeed in heathen 
times they were far more careful in this respect than at present, for 
the least offal of any description, even a hair, might be used by an 
enemy to bewitch its originator. Even to-day the fear of witchcraft, 
ISTdrau-ni-kau, is very real in Fiji. In order to bring ill-fortune to 
your enemy, you have but to discover something which he has cast off 
and burn it wrapped in the proper leaves, reciting certain spells. Or 
you may bury a cocoanut beneath his hearth, or slowly melt the wax 
from his image thus causing your victims lingering decline and death. 
The missionaries have made every effort to destroy this belief, but un- 
fortunately they do not seek to replace it by a more wholesome under- 
standing of the nature of filth-diseases, and thus as faith in witch- 
craft declines certain bodily ills increase. 

In common with other south-sea islanders, the Fijians were a cere- 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 8i 

monious people and every important affair of life was ordered in ac- 
cordance with a rigid etiquette which unhappily in many instances is 
falling into neglect before the levelling influence of the white man's law. 

Thus in the old days, the yaqona (kava of Samoa) was drunk by 
chiefs alone, and then only upon ceremonial occasions, but now all may 
partake of it and the excess thus engendered is one of the minor causes 
of the decline of the population. Wilkes, and also Williams, in his 
work on Fiji and the Fijians, describes the ceremony at Somo some 
where it was most elaborate. Early in the morning the herald stood 
in front of the chief's house and shouted yaqona ei ava, and all within 
hearing responded in a shriek Mama (prepare it). Then the chiefs 
and priests gathered within the king's house, while all others remained 
at home until the king had drunk his yaqona. Pieces of the root of 
the Macropiper methysticum were distributed among the young men, 
who must previously have rinsed their mouths and whose teeth must 
be perfect. The chewed root having been deposited in the form of rela- 
tively dry pellets in the bottom of the bowl, the herald announces to 
the king " Sir with respect the yaqona is collected." The king replies 
"Loba" (wring it). The bowl is then placed before the chief, who 
skilfully encloses the chewed fragments of root within fibers of hibiscus 
or cocoanut husks and finally wrings the fluid through this sieve, thus 
removing from the bowl all pieces of chewed root, and leaving within it 
a milky-yellow brew. While the straining is progressing, the priest 
chants a prayer in which the company finally joins. The first cocoanut 
cup is always handed to the king, who pours out a few drops as a liba- 
tion to the gods and then drinks while the assembled company sing, 
Ma-nai-di-na. La-ba-si-ye : a ta-mai ye : ai-na-ce-a-toka : Wo-ya ! yi ! 
yi ! yi !, finishing with a clapping of hands and a wild shout which is 
passed from house to house to the uttermost limits of the village. After 
the king, the company is served in the order of rank until all have par- 
taken. In old times, it is said that yaqona was grated in Fiji, but that 
the Tongans introduced the method of chewing. Having tried it, I 
must confess that the chewed root is less unpleasant in flavor than the 
grated, but at best it resembles a combination of quinine and camphor 
and is certainly an acquired taste. When drunk to excess, it tem- 
porarily paralyzes the arms and legs, at the same time exciting the 
brain. Thus violent quarrels are apt to occur at yaqona bouts, but the 
combatants are unable to injure each other. When the chief falls into 
a stupor the wives of the other participants carry their protesting hus- 
bands home. A dull headache upon awaking is the penalty for this 
over-indulgence, but the evil effects are slight in comparison with those 
resulting from alcoholic excesses. 

The British government has, however, prevented alcoholism among 
the natives; for each Fijian who desires to imbibe must annually ob- 



82 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

tain a license which he is obliged to exhibit whenever he purchases a 
drink at any public bar, and if arrested for drunkenness his license is 
confiscated, not to be renewed, and moreover the bartender is heavily 
fined if he be detected in selling drinks to natives who possess no license. 

The Fijians of to-day are more orderly and sober than, and quite 
as contented as are any peoples of European ancestry, and illiteracy is 
rarer in Fiji than in Massachusetts. You were safer even fifteen years 
ago in any part of Fiji, although your host knew how you tasted, than 
you could be in the streets of any civilized city. It is clear that in dis- 
position the Fijians are not unlike ourselves, and only in their time- 
honored customs were they barbarous. Indeed the lowest human beings 
are not in the far-off wilds of Africa, Australia or New Guinea, but 
among the degenerates of our own great cities. Nor are there any char- 
acteristics of the savage, be he ever so low, which are not retained in an 
appreciable degree by the most cultured among us. 

Yet in one important respect the savage of to-day appears to differ 
from civilized man. Civilized races are progressive and their systems 
of thought and life are changing, but the savage prefers to remain fixed 
in the culture of a long past age, which, conserved by the inertia of cus- 
tom and sanctified by religion, holds him helpless in its inexorable grasp. 
Imagination rules the world, and the world to the savage is dominated 
by a nightmare of tradition. 

It is not that there are no individuals of progressive tendencies 
among primitive tribes, but the careers of their Luthers and Galileos 
are apt to be short and to end in tragedy. Indeed, only three hundred 
years ago our own leaders of progress struggled at the risk of their 
lives against the prejudices of their contemporaries. Even with us 
every effort of progress engenders a counteracting force in the com- 
munity which tends to check its growth and to preserve the present 
status, accepting the acknowledged evil of to-day to preserve the even 
tenor of our way, for fear of the new is akin to the superstitious 
dread of the unknown. Whether the race be savage or civilized de- 
pends chiefly upon the nature of the customs that are handed down as 
patterns upon which to mold life and thought. The more ancient the 
triumph of the conservatives the more primitive the culture which is 
conserved, and the more likely is it to be crude and barbarous. A 
wonderful instance of fixity of custom is afforded by the race which in 
the ice-age lived in the caverns in the valleys of the Dordogne and the 
Vezere in central France. Their skull measurements indicate that cer- 
tain of these cave-dwellers were Esquimo and their implements and 
works of art are the same as those of the Esquimo of the Arctic regions 
of to-day, who have thus remained unchanged throughout unknown 
thousands of years, unaffected by their great journey northward fol- 
lowing the edge of the retreating ice. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 83 

Among all races religion is the most potent power to maintain 
tradition, and for the savage religion enters into every act and thought. 
To him as to the ancient Greeks everything is a personification of some 
spirit — everything is somebody. The waterfall is such, for can you 
not hear the laughter of the nymph, the clouds are spirits for they 
come and go as only gods may do, and every beast and bird and plant 
and stone is but the embodiment of a ghost or tribal hero. 

Yet it is probable that no savage has ever been more under the do- 
minion of a world of omens and portents than was Louis XI, and even 
to-day the breaking of a mirror, or the number thirteen, or a stumble 
while crossing a threshold, remains of significance to many of us. All 
matters of sentiment and credulity are closely wrapped up in this en- 
tanglement of superstition ; it is hard to divorce ourselves from the idea 
that moving machines have life and disposition. We must perforce 
associate sublimity and grandeur with the inert rock-mass of the Alps, 
and the great trees under which we played as children are sentient 
beings to our imagination, and our hearts ache as for the loss of life-long 
friends when we find them fallen to the woodman's axe. A cold heart- 
less world it indeed would be were we not illogical and therefore 
" savage " in our sentiments and loves. 

Upon analysis we find that lack of sympathy for the savage and ig- 
norance of his tradition blinds our judgment and causes us to regard 
as ridiculous in him things which we consider to be quite natural in 
ourselves. The cleverness of the Yankee who sold wooden nutmegs is 
quite amusing, but the Japanese who counterfeits an American trade- 
mark is criminal. 

There is within us Europeans an inbred contempt for all that is 
alien, and this trait, being the dominant characteristic of Christian 
peoples, has enabled us through aggressive intolerance to impress our 
customs upon all other races without ourselves being influenced by the 
cultures we have overawed into a semblance of our own. 

In strange and possibly ominous contrast with ourselves, the Jap- 
anese have for ages been keen to discover the good things of alien cul- 
tures and quick to accept them as their own, while we must remain all 
but unmoved by the example of their ennobling patriotism and mastery 
of self, the happy simplicity of their family life, their respect for 
worthy ancestors, their modesty, and their inbred grace of deportment ; 
and as for their exquisite art we chiefly relegate it to our museums, 
and their fine chivalric code, the bushido, remains all but untranslated 
into our language, much less has it entered into our thought. 

The savage may know nothing of our classics, and little of that which 
we call science, yet go with him into the deep woods and his knowledge 
of the uses of every plant and tree and rock around him and his ac- 
quaintance with the habits of the animals are a subject for constant won- 



84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

der to his civilized companion. In other words, his knowledge differs 
from ours in kind rather than in breadth or depth. His children are 
carefully and laboriously trained in the arts of war and the chase, and 
above all in the complex ceremonial of the manners of the tribe, and 
few among us can excel in memory the priests of old Samoa, who could 
sing of the ancestors of Malietoa, missing never a name among the 
hundreds back to the far-off God Savea whence this kingly race came 
down. 

One may display as much intelligence in tracking a kangaroo 
through the Australian bush as in solving a problem in algebra, and 
among ourselves it is often a matter of surprise to discover that men 
laboring in our factories are often as gifted as are the leaders of abstract 
thought within our universities. In fact the more we hnow of any class 
or race of men the deeper our sympathy, the less our antagonism, and 
the higher our respect for their endeavors. When we say we " can not 
understand" the Japanese we signify that we have not taken the trouble 
to study their tradition. 

It is a common belief that the savage is more cruel than we, and 
indeed we commonly think of him as enraged and of ourselves in pas- 
sive mood. Child-like he surely is, and his cruelties when incensed are 
as inexcusable as the destruction of Louvain or the firing of Sepoys 
from the guns, but are they more shocking than the lynching or burning 
of negroes at the stake, events so common in America that even the sen- 
sational newspapers regard them as subjects of minor interest. 

Clearly, despite our mighty institutions of freedom, efficient systems 
of public education and the devotion of thousands of our leaders to 
ideals of highest culture, there remain savages among us. Mere cen- 
turies of civilization combat the £eons of the brute. Within each and 
every one of us, suppressed perhaps but always seeking to stalk forth, 
there lurk the dark lusts of the animal, the haunting spirit of our gorilla 
ancestry. The foundations of our whole temple of culture are sunken 
deep in the mire of barbarism. It is this fundamental fact which de- 
ceives us into the impression that a few decades of contact with men 
of our own race will suffice to civilize the savage. True they soon learn 
to simulate the manners and customs of their masters, but the imitation 
is a hollow counterfeit, no more indicative of enlightenment than is the 
good behavior of caged convicts a guaranty of high mindedness. To 
achieve civilization a race must conquer itself, each individual must 
master the savage within him. Cultured man has never yet civilized a 
primitive race. Under our domination the savage dies, or becomes a 
liai'asitc or peon. 



[Reprinted from The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxxvi, No. 3, pp. 292- 

September, 1915.] 



A HISTOEY OF FIJI 

By De. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

Part III 

OP all established custoins in Fiji the most odious was cannibalism, 
yet it was always tabu for women and the lower classes, and the 
custom was extensively practised only by the chiefs and warriors. It 
is possible that in Fiji it was primitively a religious rite and did not 
originate in time of famine, or through motives of mere revenge. In- 
stead of an animal, they sacrificed the best they had to the gods, and 
as the flesh of the animal was eaten by the chiefs, so was the flesh of 
man. Indeed, an old myth asserts that once there was no cannibalism 
in Fiji, and even when it was most prevalent there was always a party 
opposed to it, maintaining that it caused various skin diseases. At the 
town of Nakelo on the Eewa river, it was tabu to eat human flesh. 

We incline, however, to the belief that the Fijians were cannibals 
simply because they enjoyed the taste of human flesh, for I have met 
with no dissent to the opinion that of all meat it is the most palatable, 
and it is evident that the custom could not have survived a decade had 
mere religion prompted its continuance. The fact appears to be that, 
in common with other privileges, the chiefs and priests had succeeded 
in monopolizing its pleasures through the agency of the tabu, for among 
.savages the priesthood is quick to defer to the desires of those in power. 
In prehistoric times the natives had but little animal food, apart from 
the fish of the reefs and the snakes of the mountains, for pigs, ducks 
and chickens were introduced only recently. When man attempts to 
live upon a vegetable diet, even though it be varied by fish, an insatiate 
craving for animal food comes over him, he "Kalau's," as the natives 
say, and it is an interesting fact that cannibalism is almost unknown 
among peoples whose meat-supply has always been abundant and varied. 
Once it be acquired, this longing for human flesh remains a tempta- 
tion haunting its possessor. Well does one remember the vim of a 
wild Marquesan dance. It was near midnight and the flickering glare 
of the bonfire cut into the blackness of the surrounding forest. An 
old chief, standing by the embers, led the chant, while his tribesmen, 
with hands joined, danced furiously around him. Translated into Eng- 
lish, the burden of their song was "I have eaten your father, your 
mother, your brother, now I intend to eat you ! whoo ! ! hack ! ! ! " — in 

85 



86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

a bestial shriek that rang back in echoes from the cliffs. Then, one by 
one, at unexpected times and from unforeseen recesses, the maidens of 
the tribe emerged from the dark aisles among the trees ; their graceful 
bodies glistening where the fire-light glinted upon the cocoanut oil that 
covered their shapely limbs. Gay flowers stood out among the riot of 
their flowing locks, and like elfin things they flitted with tremulous 
arms outstretched until they stood fully revealed in the red glare, only 
to flutter silently backward and vanish. In days gone by that dark- 
ness concealed from view a gruesome meal. 

Basil Thomson points out the fact that in Fiji the practise in- 
creased greatly just before the coming of white men, as had that of 
human sacrifice among the Aztecs a few years before the arrival of 
Cortez. With the sudden increase in the power of the great chiefs, it 
began to lose its religious significance and an acknowledged appetite 
for cannibal meat was boastfully proclaimed. Thus Tanoa, Ea Undre- 
undre, Tui Kilakila, and others were cannibals because they enjoyed 
the taste of man, but not all Fijians liked human flesh, even as terrapin 
is not enjoyed by all white men. 

The most hideous features of cannibalism were the fiendish tortures, 
Vaka-totogana, connected with it wherein the victims were gradually 
dismembered and their noses, tongues, arms, or legs cooked and eaten 
before their eyes, pieces of their own flesh being offered to them in 
derision. Even if the missionaries had accomplished nothing else, their 
success in abolishing cannibalism would have sanctified their labors. 
Let nothing blind us to an appreciation of the undaunted courage and 
unexcelled devotion to their faith displayed by these unselfish men and 
women, who, actuated by high and simple motives, left homes and 
friends, and labored cheerfully through long years over the seemingly 
hopeless task of bringing the light of a happier day to the barbarians 
of Fiji. 

People who had died a natural death were rarely or never eaten, 
and only those killed in battle, captured, or wrecked "with salt water 
in their eyes," were offered to the gods and roasted. The dead, if killed 
in battle and buried, they would disinter even after the tenth day when 
the body could not be lifted entire from the grave and was therefore 
torn apart and made into puddings. Every one agrees that decomposi- 
tion did not deter their appetite for human flesh, any more than it 
impairs our own taste for game, yet all other meat was discarded by 
the Fijians as by us upon the least indication of dissolution. 

Among old Fijian chiefs whom I knew between 1897-1899, none 
expressed the slightest abhorrence of cannibalism, and some were frank 
enough to state that were European influences removed they would at 
once renew the practise. To the Fijian no revenge is assuaged until 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 87 

3'ou have eaten your enemy, but the deepest contempt for a fallen foe 
was indicated by roasting and then refusing to devour the body. 

One of the best descriptions of a cannibal feast is that given by 
Jackson in Erskine's voyage published in 1853; and the Eev. Thomas 
•Williams^ in his work upon " Fiji and the Fijians " describes the rites 
in detail, having often observed them. 

The canoes when approaching the shore would indicate that human 
prey was on board by striking the water at intervals with a pole. See- 
ing the splashes, the natives gathered in a howling mob along the shore, 
the women breaking into a wild, lascivious dance. The victims were 
seized by the arms and dragged to the temple, their captors chanting 
the cannibal song: 

Yari au malua. Yari au malua. 
Drag me gently. Drag me gently. 

Oi au na saro ni nomu vanna. 

For I am the champion of thy land. 
Yi mudokia! Yi mudokia! Yi mudokia! 
Give thanks! Give thanks! Give thanks! 

Ki Dama le! 
Yi! u-woa-ai-a! 

Sharp-edged strips of bamboo served as knives for the butcher, and 
after being roasted or steamed, the flesh was eaten by means of a wooden 
fork, each high chief having one of these which it was tabu for any one 
but himself to touch. 

Cannibalism was dreaded by the lower classes for they were for- 
bidden to participate in the feasts, and were themselves most frequently 
the victims of these orgies. Thus when the missionaries succeeded in 
developing even in a rudimentary form the force of "public opinion" 
the practice was suppressed far more easily than had been anticipated, 
for it was a rite maintained by the aristocracy and the priests and had 
become a terrible engine of despotism. 

Another institution which appears to have been practised from time 
immemorial in Fiji was polygamy. The great majority of Fijians were 
not polygamous, however, for only the highest chiefs could afford to 
maintain more than one wife, and even those of most exalted rank 
rarely had more than ten wives. There is reason to suppose that the 
number of women has always been less than that of men in Fiji, owing 
to the greater care devoted to the rearing of warriors. 

A man of the middle classes rarely married before the age of 
twenty-five, at which time his mother chose a wife from among the 
daughters of his maternal uncle (his orthogamous cousins, veidavolani). 
One quarter of all Fijian marriages are still of this character, and they 
produce healthy offspring. 

1 Williams was by far the most assiduous and accurate observer of Fijian 
customs, and it is to be regretted that his manuscript was edited and "re- 
pressed" by a Mr. Eowe of London who had never visited Fiji. 



88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

Men of the lowest class frequently remained bachelors throughout 
life, and all unmarried females of the peasantry were disposed of by 
the chief of the tribe. In Mbau this match-making chief was next in 
rank to the vunivalu, Thakombau. It is evident that Basil Thomson is 
right when he says that the abandonment of polygamy could have had 
no serious influence upon the vitality of the race, for it affected too few. 

It is a common mistake to assume that social anarchy is the rule in 
primitive communities ; for the reverse is true, and savage races are the 
ones par excellence most dominated by established forms, their system 
of life remaining unchanged for generation after generation. This is 
illustrated most clearly in an interesting paper by Lord Amherst of 
Hackney and Basil Thomson published by the Hakluyt Society of 
London in 1901, which shows that, since their discovery in 1568, the 
customs of the Solomon islanders have remained absolutely unaltered, 
until crushed under the rule of white men. 

Among these fixed customs of savage tribes, some are actually better 
than our own. Thus in Fiji prostitution was checked as effectively as 
any mere system could prevent it. This was accomplished by obliging 
all the unmarried men to sleep each night in a special house, the 
Mbure-ni-sa, or men's house, while the virgins were kept at home with 
their parents. 

Indeed, the use of the Mbure-ni-sa was even extended, under cer- 
tain conditions, to the married men. There were no milk-producing 
animals in Fiji, and the food of the natives is still so deficient in animal 
proteids that it can hardly afford sufficient nourishment for healthy 
growth until the child is nearly four years old. Accordingly, when a 
child was born, husband and wife separated; she going to live for a 
year with her mother's relatives, and he to sleep for the following 
two or three years in the Mbure with the unmarried men. Thus 
throughout the suckling period the risk of a new conception was avoided, 
and the full strength of the mother was preserved to nourish her infant. 

Unhappily, the Europeans saw fit to break up this system, main- 
taining that it interfered with family life and was destructive of mutual 
affection. The tabu having thus been abolished, conceptions often 
occur within a year following the birth of a child, and the mother's 
milk is rendered inefficient as a means of nourishment, while at the 
same time the drain upon her strength is so great that the unborn child 
may not properly develop. Thus the new system has increased the 
birth-rate, but at the same time produces weak, sickly infants whose 
death-rate is far greater than in former times. This indeed is one of 
the most potent causes of the decrease of the Fijian population, espe- 
cially as the married women now attempt to escape the strain of these 
exhausting pregnancies by resorting to abortion, a practise which has 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 89 

increased in recent years to the serious impairment of the vitality of 
the race. 

Moreover, the abolition of the Mhure-ni-sa has brought about a too 
sudden and promiscuous commingling of the young men and ^women, 
and the commission appointed by the British government to inquire 
ill to the causes which are producing the decline of the Fijian population 
has decided that sexual depravity has increased since the abandon- 
ment of heathenism, for licentiousness formerly kept down by the 
chief's club is now merely forbidden. 

Seeman states that the natives were shocked when he told them that 
English women frequently bore children at intervals of a year apart, 
and upon reflection they decided this accounted for there being so many 
"shrimps" (small men) among Europeans. 

In common with some other primitive races, the Fijians looked 
frankly upon those problems of sexual relations which we attempt to 
ignore or to cloak under a mantle of secrecy, too often pernicious to 
the welfare of our race. The average European is too apt to be horri- 
fied when he hears a spade called by its simplest name, and to his mind 
msrality implies an unnatural hypocrisy respecting the physiological 
facts of life. He forgets that acts and words are in themselves inno- 
cent unless their intention be otherwise, and in many matters of this 
sort the missionary has unfortunately made cowards and liars of his 
converts, and it is undoubtedly true that the influence of civilization in 
the Pacific has tended to increase rather than diminish all forms of 
clandestine sexual depravity. 

I have heard competent and unprejudiced observers state that the 
Fijians were fully as affectionate in heathen times as at present. Fam- 
ily affection fortunately springs from nature itself and is not a product 
of our system of life, however cultured or barbarous. One sees the 
naked women of Australia, whose bodies are covered with self-inflicted 
sears, gaze rapturously upon their children and exhibit maternal love 
as truly as could any European mother, and even Wilkes, who refers to 
the Fijians as "the most barbarous and savage race now existing upon 
the globe," states that he saw " engaged couples walking affectionately 
arm-in-arm as with us." 

One of the saddest, because the most apparent change that has af- 
fected the lives of the Pacific islanders is the needless decay of their 
arts. War, and the ceremonies and obligations of religion once pro- 
vided the major motive for the maintenance and development of varied 
crafts. In fact, the intent of practically every piece of decorative work 
was either to propitiate the gods and tribal spirits, or to frighten a 
real or imaginary enemy. Nor is this peculiar to savage tribes, for all 
the complex ornaments which adorn the yokes of horses in Naples are 



90 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

" evil eye " charms which have come down almost unaltered from Eoman 
times. 

The missionary soon saw that most of his so-called converts had 
only added the white man's god to those of their ancestors. In order, 
therefore, to obliterate old beliefs, he discouraged the making of all 
"symbols of heathenism," and, as these were displayed in almost every 
implement, art fell at once under the awe-inspiring ban of his dis- 
pleasure. 

Yet the decline of native art was to some degree inevitable even if 
the missionaries had attempted to foster and preserve it, for it perished 
chiefly because of its inadaptability, and the absence of a market for its 
wares. The cheapest calico is softer and more enduring than the best 
of tapa, the coarsest canvas sail is superior to that woven of pandanus 
leaves, the beautiful adze of polished stone fails wholly when placed in 
competition with even the " trade hatchet." 

Yet in each group there was at least some native art which, had it 
been cared for by the whites, might have been preserved so that in a 
more or less modified form it might have furnished a permanent and 
progressively important means of livelihood to the natives, and thus 
have become a means of maintaining their racial entity and self-respect. 

Art was "the highest expression of their intellectual life, an absorb- 
ing field for their ambition, a means of gratifying their instinct for 
the beautiful, and a record of their history and their conception of the 
universe. It meant far more to them than it does to us with our 
widely varied interests, and to this the European was blind when he 
permitted its destruction. 

All over the south seas in proportion as white men have become dom- 
inant native arts have withered. Once the canoe was built of separate 
pieces skilfully calked and lashed together, and its outrigger was a 
marvel of flexibility and strength. Yet everywhere it degenerates into 
a crudely hollowed log, crossed by two rough sticks to which the out- 
rigger is rigidly tied. The house, once shapely in form and carefully 
thatched, degenerates into a mere shack, and every carved bowl, paddle 
and implement becomes rude, ugly and misshapen. All care in manu- 
facture degenerates, and in proportion does the light of their intellec- 
tual life fade out. A hopeless apathy, a listless lack of interest in all 
around them overcomes their dulled minds and their lives, like those of 
prisoners, are no longer worth the while of living, for hope can not 
flower within the stifle of the cold gray walls of bigotry's bastile. 

Pleasures and sports suffer as do the arts. The surf-board riders 
of Hawaii are now rarely seen, dances and songs are being constantly 
suppressed, and many happy things that once filled their minds with 
joy, and were beautiful in their eyes, have vanished never to be theirs 
again. But one resource is left to their idle minds, and clandestine 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 



91 



immorality saps their strength. As the Government Commission in 
Fiji reports 

premature civilization, mental apathy and lack of ambition under the new con- 
ditions are among the most important causes of the decline of the population. 

This carefully selected commission was appointed by the British 
government in Fiji to inquire into the causes of the decrease in the 
native population^ and after long investigation the conclusions of the 
commissioners were published by the Colony in 1896.2 It is probable 
that in 1859 there were about 200,000 natives; in 1868, 170,000 ; in 1871, 
140,000; in 1881 there were 114,700 and in 1891, 105,800 while in 



ILLDSTEATING THE DECLIKE IN THE NATIVE POPULATION OF THE PlJI ISLANDS FROM 

1859 to 1911. 



1901 the population had still further declined to 94,400, and the males 
outnumbered the females in the proportion of 8 to 7. In 1911 there 
were but 87,096 natives, and if the decline continues at its present 
rate the last Fijian must die before another century has passed.^ 

The commission decides that children have ceased to be useful, and 
whereas in old days they strengthened the tribe in war, they now suffer 
neglect. The birth rate is higher than that of England yet only 11/20 
of the children survive to be one year old.* Another cause is said to be 

2 Eeport of the Commission appointed to inquire into the causes of the de- 
cline of the native population. Published by the Colony of Fiji, Suva, 1896, 
pp. v 4- 130. 

3 Should the natives continue to decline at the rate which has pertained 
since 1881 they must become extinct in the year 2004. 

4 "Within recent years the medical department under the able leadership of 
Doctor G. W. A. Lynch has been enabled to take measures which appear to have 
reduced this infant mortality so that nearly 78 per cent, of the children survive 
the first year. 



92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

the general want of vitality due to the effects of past epidemics, such 
as the "wasting sickness" in 1797, the dysentery of 1803 and the 
measles of 1875. One is, however, inclined to believe that no permanent 
evil effects could be produced as a result of these physiological disasters. 
Iso matter how severe the epidemic, those who are physically the best 
are the most apt to survive and become the progenitors of successive 
generations, and thus the race might even be improved through natural 
selection. There is no evidence tending to prove that the black deatli 
of the fourteenth century or the plague in London in the time of 
Charles II. resulted in any permanent physical deterioration of the 
races they affected. The Fijians may be a vanishing people, but in 
physical appearance they remain superior as of old, and their superb 
stature and mental attainments appear not to have declined even though 
the race as a whole be dying. 

There is, however, one cardinal evil in the Fijian situation and tliat 
is the severe strain of child-raising which falls upon the women in a 
country wherein the proper food for the maintenance of lactation has 
not yet been produced in sufficient quantity. The children, being 
thus in a peculiar sense dependent upon their mothers, will be pro- 
foundly affected by any conditions which produce injury to the women 
of the tribe. 

Yaws, dysentery and whooping cough are now primary causes of 
the decline of population. Among minor causes the committee men- 
tions the abolition of polygamy ; for under monogamy the motlier must 
not only tend her child, but gather the food and cultivate the soil, 
whereas in polygamous days these latter duties were taken over by the 
other wives during the early period of tlie infant's life. 

The report makes it clear that the decline is due chiefly to the high 
death rate of children, and also that we must proceed very slowly and sym- 
pathetically, using as little force as possible, in the introduction of civili- 
zation. The old socialism must gradually he replaced by a certain 
measure of individualism, and the warrior's ambitions must give place 
to those of the craftsman. Hygiene as a subject of primary importance 
must be taught not only in the schools, but chiefly by example, upon 
the plan of the college settlement, by teachers living in so far as pos- 
sible as the natives themselves now live, thus slowhj changing the 
habits of life of those around them, and indeed these teachers should 
themselves he natives of the most enlightened type, and maintained in 
government employ. 

A most interesting sociological experiment has been conducted by 
the British in their government of the Fijians. It is one of the very 
few instances wherein altruism is the key-note in the rule of the strong 
over the weak, and its maintenance through all these years in the face 
of much discouragement and expense is an honor to Great Bi'itain, in 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 93 

the pride of which all the world may share — it is a rare triumph of 

idealism over selfishness. 

As Mr. Allardyce,-^ then colonial secretary, said to me : 

We came here not as conquerors but through invitation, and the best we 

have to give is none too good for these people who have entrusted their destiny 

to our care. 

Indeed, if the South Sea Islanders are now to be saved new interests 
and new arts must be developed by them, and new ambitions other than 
the withered remnants of the old must be created. Industrial schools 
are sadly needed in the Pacific, and the dawn of the first real progress 
will appear when men like Booker Washington arise among the natives 
of Fiji. The establishment of non-sectarian manual training schools 
such as his, in so far as possible under native teachers and supported by 
native efforts, might soon revolutionize their whole system of life, and 
change them from well-behaved jarisoners into purposeful men and 
women. 

The missionaries now conduct nearly all the schools in Fiji, and it 
is much to their credit that illiteracy is almost as rare as in Germany, 
all the present generation being able to read and write their own lan- 
guage. These schools are fundamentally good, but the natives should 
be taught not only how to pray, but also how to labor and to live. The 
missionaries would doubtless welcome an opportunity to extend the 
scope of native education, but the expense of establishing trade schools 
is too great for their resources and the project demands government 
aid. That the return to the state would ultimately far more than 
repay the outlay can not be doubted, for even the non-altruistic Dutch 
well know the profit accruing to Java and hence to themselves through 
the establishment of agricultural schools for natives. 

Every indication of an initiative among the Fijians in the direc- 
tion of craft-development should be wisely encouraged instead of being, 
as at present, smothered under the cloak of a paternalism that oblit- 
erates error only by crushing endeavor. 

It may be confidently hoped that the British government which has 
labored so persistently and at such constant expense to develop Fiji 
"for the Fijians" and not for the surfeit of those who would selfishly 
exploit the natives, willtake this final step and render it possible for 
the natives to raise themselves to a position of self-dependence. This 
was, indeed, the confessed intention of certain high officials of the col- 
ony whom I enjoyed the pleasure of meeting when in Fiji. So con- 
sistent have the English been in their effort actually to civilize and ele- 
vate the Fijians that their policy has been pursued for years despite 
financial loss and tlie frequent protests of the whites, as is evidenced 
by the steady decline of the white population from 2,750 in 1871 to 
2,036 in 1891, since which time it has slowly risen, becoming 3,707 in 

5 Now, Sir William Allardyee, Governor of the Bahamas. 



94 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

1911. The public debt in 1910 was £104,115 and the native taxes 
amounted only to about £16,000, the principal source of revenue be- 
ing derived from customs receipts which were £129,552, the latter be- 
ing, of course, an indirect tax upon the colony itself. 

Since 1874, settlers have been discouraged from employing Fijians 
upon their plantations, for the native population was rapidly being en- 
slaved by the whites. In order to supply the necessary labor, Hindoo 
coolies from Calcutta were imported, but it seems unfortunate that 
these usually remained in Piji after the expiration of their terms of 
service and there are now 40,300 in the group. They are a clannish, 
industrious, bigoted race whom the Fijians despise and with whom they 
do not mingle. Indeed, there are far more half-breds between the 
whites and Fijians than between Fijians and Hindoos. 

Although all native arts have suffered and some have wholly dis- 
appeared in Fiji, the introduction of European methods has been slower 
in this group than elsewhere in the Pacific. Spears and clubs and 
other implements of war are no longer made unless, indeed, it be to sell 
to tourists, and the dancing masks and wigs of former days have dis- 
appeared, along with the cannibal forks. Once the natives took great 
pride in their war-clubs, and a man's rank was indicated by the fashion 
of his club and his manner of carrying it, only chiefs being permitted 
to bear it over the shoulder as we would a gun. The handle was 
notched whenever the club had served to kill a man, and such a weapon 
was called a " ngandro " to distinguish it from common clubs. Indeed 
the more famous clubs were given individual names, a certain chief be- 
ing the proud possessor of one called " the giver of rest." Elaborately 
carved, and built up, spears of iron-wood ten or fifteen feet long were 
common, and were sometimes tipped with the spine of the sting-ray, 
which upon breaking within the wound caused certain death. In the 
distant villages among the mountains of the large islands, spears and 
clubs were still to be seen in the houses in 1899, but from more acces- 
sible places they have long since disappeared to crowd the shelves of 
our museums. Everywhere the natives of the coasts have yielded, and 
more or less conformed to the white man's customs, but only a few 
miles inland, isolated by the dense forests or walled in by mountains, 
they were in 1900 almost as in heathen times. Yet even in these re- 
mote places the natives are not wholly separated from the world, for 
news is carried rapidly by word of mouth, and Wilkes speaks of a case 
in which a message was transmitted 20 miles through a forested country 
in less than six hours. 

The pursuit of war was once the chief concern of the Fijians, and 
was often conducted in a very ceremonious fashion. An offended chief 
thrust sticks into the ground, and removed them only when appeased. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 95 

If war was determined upon a herald was sent to the village of the 
enemy to announce the fact. As is universal with primitive people, 
the mustering of the army was the occasion for much extravagant 
boasting, and their faces were painted red or half red and half black. 
Miss Gordon Gumming gives a striking description of the wild war- 
dance and the boasts of the warriors who assembled at the call of Sir 
Arthur Gordon to take part in the war against the cannibal tribes of the 
Singatoka Eiver in the mountains. " This is only a musket " cried 
one warrior "but I carry it." By contrast the men from Mbau came 
up in stately fashion, their spokesman saying "This is Mbau, that is 
enough." 

The towns were often fortified with wooden stockades or stone 
walls, and were sometimes surrounded by moats. There are no records 
of protracted sieges, for the attacking party never could carry sufficient 
food to enable them to remain long before the walls of the besieged. 
They depended almost wholly upon treachery, ambushes or sudden 
and unexpected assaults; and to kill a woman or a child or even a pig 
was considered a creditable feat, as when Thakombau's warriors re- 
turned to Mbau boasting, "We have killed seven of the enemy's pigs 
and two women." Before the introduction of firearms, it is probable 
that native warfare caused but little loss of life, for fear kept the com- 
batants skulking at a fairly safe distance from one another. 

Wilkes, who himself made war upon the natives of Malolo after 
they had killed Lieutenant Underwood and Midshipman Henry, de- 
scribes their martial customs at great length and should be read by 
those interested in the matter. 

The cruelties practised when a town was overcome were unspeak- 
able, and on the island of Wakaia the chief and all within his village 
threw themselves over a high cliff to be dashed to death rather than 
surrender. 

Fijian warfare, like that of cannibalism, is indeed a sordid subject. 
Not a single struggle waged by any tribe was for the establishment of a 
worthy principle. Lust for murder, the capture of women, revenge 
for real, or more often imaginary, insults were the actuating motives 
of all native wars. There is in the language no word expressing dis- 
approbation for the killing of a human being. Indeed, no matter how 
brutal, treacherous or cowardly the murder of man, woman or child 
the murderer immediately gained the proud title of koroi, which in- 
sured to him a good position among the spirits of the world to come, 
and permitted him to blacken his face and chest with a peculiar war- 
paint. Murder was thus an open sesame to social distinction and re- 
ligious well-being. 

The Fijians are courageous in the sense that all men are brave 
when wrought up to the point of action, and when facing a situation 



96 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

they understand. Their first sight of a horse, however, drove even 
the doughtiest warriors to take refuge in the trees, and when upon a 
dark night Wilkes came to anchor off the coast and set off rockets, the 
silence of the shore broke into a long shriek of terror, village after 
village catching the contagion of the fright. Even to-day the white 
man inspires a mysterious lurking fear, and in the mountain villages 
and in parts rarely visited by Europeans, the women and little children 
shrink and run at your ' approach, and even the men seem somewhat 
" stage struck." To their minds we must be past masters of witchcraft. 

Indeed, in common with all beliefs and practises which may be 
securely hidden from the eyes of Europeans, witchcraft still survives 
in Fiji, as it does among the lower classes of Europe and America. The 
natives are fond of the "occult" and several miracles are still per- 
formed. Thus at the village of Nandawa, on Ivoro island, an old man 
stands upon a high rock and calls to the sea-turtles, shouting in Fijian, 
Come ! Come ! We are tired of waiting ! upon which several turtles 
appear swimming toward the shore. It is highly probable that these 
are regularly fed and are thus always ready for the "miracle" when 
strangers visit the town. Koro, by the way, is the island to which the 
souls of all dead pigs were supposed to go to their valhalla. 

At the village of Eukua on Mbenga a curious miracle play is en- 
acted. Near the town there is a circular pit about twenty feet in 
diameter, the bottom of which is lined with brown-colored volcanic 
stones, a ring of large fiat ones lying near the edge around the bottom 
of the depression. The pit is filled with dry sticks and a fire is main- 
tained until the stones are red hot. Then the embers are bruslied 
away, and out of the forest there comes a procession of young men gaily 
adorned with garlands of flowers and well polished with cocoanut oil. 
They chant as they tread slowly and deliberately over the hot stones, and 
then vanish into the woods, apparently uninjured ; upon which pigs 
and vegetables are placed upon the stones and are covered with leaves 
and earth, and a thoroughly cooked feast is soon ready for both guests 
and performers. Professor Langley witnessed a similar exhibition in 
the Society Islands, and discovered that the radiation from the surface 
of the volcanic stones is very great, while the stones themselves are poor 
conductors of heat, thus the surface soon cools while enough heat still 
remains within to serve in cooking the feast. The natives can not be 
induced to walk over limestone, which is a good conductor and poor 
radiator, the surface thus remaining hot. However, the great thick- 
ness of the skin upon the sole of their unshod feet accounts in some 
measure for their ability to perform this " miracle." In all respects 
natural sole leather is superior to that provided by the "leather trust." 

A pleasing art which still survives, but is doomed to extinction, is 
the making and decorating of tapa, or masi, as it is called in Fiji, where 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 97 

it is still used for screens in houses, and for various decorative pur- 
poses. Women alone take part in the manufacture of tapa. They care- 
fully cultivate the paper mulberry {Broussonetia papyrifera), and, when 
about six feet high, the young trees are cut down, and the bark peeled 
off and soaked in water. The outer skin is then scraped off with a 
sharp-edged shell, and the soft fibrous inner bark is ready for beating, 
although it may be kept indefinitely before this process is begun. For 
beating, the strips of bark must be thoroughly water-soaked and soft, 
and two are placed one over the other upon a flattened log and beaten 
with a rectangular mallet, iki, having three of its flat sides grooved and 
one plane. Each pair of strips of an inch in original width may thus 
be beaten out into a thin sheet of felted fibers nine inches wide, although 
the length is reduced. Separate sheets are then welded together by 
beating, the overlapping edges being first glued with a paste made from 
arrowroot boiled in water, this welding being so cleverly done that it is 
almost impossible to tell where the pieces overlie one another. The sheet 
is then spread upon the grass and exposed to the sun to bleach. These 
sheets may be very large, one we measured being 160 feet long and 12 
feet wide, but Williams mentions a sheet 180 yards long ! 

After being bleached, they produce a pattern upon the tapa with a 
brown dye derived from the Aleurites triloba, the dull color of which 
is relieved at intervals by large black circular spots, thus by contrast 
giving a bright and effective pattern. This process of decorating is de- 
scribed in detail by Thomas Williams in his most interesting work upon 
" Fiji and the Fijians." Strips of bamboo are placed in the form of 
the design upon a flat surface, or the design is carved in relief in a 
board. Then the tapa is stretched over the template and the cloth 
rubbed with the dye, whereupon the color adheres to all raised places and 
fails to appear in the hollows, and a "printed" pattern is produced. 
So characteristic are the checquered patterns of the tapas of the several 
islands that the locality of each piece can be determined upon the most 
casual inspection. The black and white tapas of Taviuni are most ef- 
fective, and those of Lakemba probably the most artistic made in the 
group. It seems strange that although these tapas have for ages been 
printed in designs, little or no meaning was associated with the details 
of the pattern. There were, however, certain appropriate patterns for 
weddings and other ceremonies, and the flags of the various classes of 
warriors were more or less distinctive. Thus at Rewa the banner of 
the king's or high chiefs party was white with four or five vertical 
black stripes at one end, that of the vunivalu or general had horizontal 
stripes, and that of the land owners was plain white. Yet the tapa 
flags never became tribal emblems, on the one hand, or personal coats- 
of-arms, on the other, but remained merely class badges, and thus no 
precise symbolism was associated with the designs. 



9B THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

In groups other than Fiji the inner bark of the bread-fruit tree, 
and of the yellow hibiscus Paritium tiliaceum are used in making tapa. 
Yellow turmeric, bone charcoal, brilliant red and rich brown dyes, are 
displayed upon tapas of tlie Pacific. 

The art must surely disappear, for Manchester is now printing 
calicos in the patterns of the native tapas and these are being sold to 
the islanders, who prefer them to designs of their own making. In some 
groups traders have brought in anilin dj^es which the natives call " mis- 
sionary colors," the word "missionary" being applied to almost any 
newly introduced thing. Thus is an ancient and primitive art being 
debased, and another means of employment must disappear from native 
life. At the time of the author's visits the beating of the iJcis (mallets) 
was the most characteristic sound in a Fijian village, but in a few more 
years this too must go the way of many another activity which once 
engrossed the attention and stimulated the imagination of the natives. 

Tapa in Fiji was once used for the white turbans of the chiefs and 
the simple waist band or malo worn by all men. In the case of chiefs 
the ends of the waist cloth formed long streamers, those of king Tanoa 
being so long that they trailed upon the ground. When yaqona was 
served, all chiefs removed their turbans, excepting only the Eoko Tui 
of Mbau who was regarded as being a human personification of a god. 

The women never wore tapa, but were clothed in the simple liJcu 
or waist band of hibiscus bark or grasses which is still worn among 
the mountain tribes, although along the coast the Europeans have 
abolished both it and the malo, obliging all to wear a waist-cloth of 
calico. In some respects they were a modest people before these changes 
were effected, and fortunately for the natives their new rulers did not 
oblige them to don more clothing. In other parts of the Pacific the 
missionaries have forced the natives to wear European garments, far 
too hot for tropical climates. Such clothes are so expensive that few 
or none of the natives can afford to own more than one suit, and this 
soon becomes a filthy menace to health. Tuberculosis stalks in when 
European clothes appear, and all unprejudiced observers will agree that 
the most diseased and immoral races now in the Pacific are those who 
have been obliged to wear the most clothing. 

Their own clothes permitted the natives to bathe freely, but the 
whites now demand that the natives shall don special bathing suits or 
at least enter the water clothed in some European garments. This prac- 
tically forces them either to abstain from their health-giving sport of 
former times or to swim fully clothed, as they now do in Hawaii. These 
cold wet clothes are a cause of influenza leading to tuberculosis, and 
everywhere the natives are less cleanly as Christians than they were as 
heathens. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 99 

In former times the Fijians took great pride in the arrangement 
of their hair, and a wide range of individual taste was permitted in this 
respect, as may be seen in the illustrations given by Williams in his 
'' Fiji and the Fijians/' or the colored plate published in the narrative of 
the voyage of the Challenger. Usually they trained the hair to grow 
into a huge thick mop standing out on all sides fully eight inches from 
the head, and sometimes as much as 62 inches in circumference. In 
order to effect this, the hair was saturated with oil mixed with charcoal 
and then dyed so that blue, white, brilliant red, black or parti-colored 
mops were in fashion. The high chiefs had barbers whose sole duty 
was to care for the hair of their masters, and whose hands were tabu 
from feeding themselves so that others had to provide them with food 
and drink. Such a barber might not remove a cigarette from his 
mouth or hold it in his hands and was thus obliged to twist a twig 
around it in order to avoid the weed's coming in contact with his hands. 
Curiously enough, barbers might work in their gardens, but were not 
permitted to use their hands in eating their own vegetables. Probably 
no savage race devoted more care to hair and beards than did the 
Fijians. They are very rarely bald, and indeed this was considered to 
be a great disfigurement, and the defect was concealed by a wig. To 
preserve these unwieldy mops of hair, the natives were obliged to sleep 
upon a wooden pillow which was placed under the neck and held the 
head four or five inches above the floor. 

To the European, all customs are apt to be classed as "bad" in 
proportion as they differ from those of his own race, but it should be 
said that in Fiji the missionaries have been more conservative and dis- 
played far more sympathy and sense in their reforms than elsewhere 
in the Pacific. Nevertheless, all forms of really active exercises or keen 
enjoyment have a somewhat wicked appearance to a certain type of 
religious mind, and unhappily the mediocre man is the one who is 
apt to rule in deciding the fate of such affairs. They too often fail to 
see that when an old custom is to be abolished sometliing should be de- 
vised to take its place. Thus their vandalism of bigotry has resulted in 
destroying or hindering the open practise of nearly all the old arts and 
amusements; and almost nothing but hymns and prayers and a cheer- 
less sabbath resembling that of Puritan days in old New England have 
been given to the natives in exchange for all they have been forced to 
surrender. 

The Fijians once took great delight in their club dances, but these 
have now been repressed and have lost much of their former anima- 
tion. In one of these festivities which we witnessed the men leaped 
frantically in perfect unison, branishing their clubs and throwing them 
from hand to hand, often shielding their eyes with one hand as if 
searching for a hidden or distant enemy. At regular intervals they 



loo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 

shouted Wa hoo! in a fierce yell that could have been heard at a dis- 
tance of a quarter of a mile, while all the village crowded in a square 
around the dancers, beating log drums, clapping hands and chanting 
something which sounded like " Somo seri rangi tu Somo seri somo," 
over and over again. Often the meanings of words used in their songs 
are unknown to the natives of modern times. Wilkes gives an excellent 
description of a club-dance in which the best dancers were mimicked by 
a clown covered from head to foot with green and dried leaves, and 
wearing a mask half orange and half black. 

The milder mekes (songs with gestures) are wisely encouraged by 
the missionaries, and these are still a source of constant amusement to 
the natives. Fiji has not yet been suppressed into a realm of sullen 
silence as have too many parts of the Pacific. 

There is a fascination in the elemental force of the word-pictures 
in these songs. We stifle in the heavy air of the dull and ominous calm. 
Then comes the rising roar of the onrush and our hearts go out to the 
frail canoes struggling so bravely in a maddened sea, and the pathos 
of life and death is there when the hot sun glares down once more, and 
the ripples glint unheedingly around the silent floating thing over 
which the sea-birds scream. 



[Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, Vol. i, No. 1, pp. 18-35, October, 1915.] 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 

By Dr. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 
IV 

THE Fijians had a well-organized social system which recognized six 
classes of society. (1) Kings and queens (Tuis and Andis). (2) 
Chiefs of districts (Eokos). (3) Chiefs of villages, priests (Betes), 
and land owners (Mata-ni-vanuas). (4) Distinguished warriors of 
low birth, chiefs of the carpenter caste (Eokolas), and chiefs of the 
turtle fishermen. (5) Common people (Kai-si). (6) Slaves taken in 
battle. 

The high chiefs still inspire great respect, and indeed it has been 
the policy of the British government to maintain a large measure of 
their former authority. Thus of the 17 provinces into which the group 
was divided, 11 are governed by high chiefs entitled Roko Tui, and 
there are about 176 inferior chiefs who are the head men of districts, 
and 31 native magistrates. In so far as may be consistent with order 
and civilization these chiefs are permitted to govern in the old paternal 
manner, and they are veritably patriarchs of their people. The dis- 
trict chiefs are still elected by the land owners, mata-ni-vanuas, by a 
showing of hands as of old. 

Independent of respect paid to those in authority, rank is still 
reverenced in Fiji. Once acting under the kind permission and advice 
of our generous friend Mr. Allardyce, the colonial secretary, and ac- 
companied by my ship-mates Drs. Charles H. Townsend, and H. F. 
Moore, I went upon a journey of some days into the interior of Viti 
Levu, our guide and companion being Ratu Pope Seniloli, a grandson 
of king Thakombau, and one of the high chiefs of Mbau. Upon meet- 
ing Eatu Pope every native dropped his burdens, stepped to the side 
of the wood-path and crouched down, softly chanting the words of the 
tama, muduo! wo! Ko one ever stepped upon his shadow, and if 
desirous of crossing his path they passed in front, never behind him. 
Clubs were lowered in his presence, and no man stood fully erect when 
he was near. The very language addressed to high chiefs is different 
from that used in conversation between ordinary men, these customs 
being such that the inferior places himself in a defenceless position 
with respect to his superior. 

It is a chiefs privilege to demand service from his subjects; which 
was fortunate for us, for when we started down the Waidina Eiver from 




Ratu Pope Seniloli, Grandson of King Thakombad of Fiji. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 103 




A Fijian Village, Kambaha Island, Fiji. 

Nabukaluka our canoes were so small and overloaded that the ripples 
were constantly lapping in over the gunwale, threatening momentarily 
to swamp ns. Soon, however, we came upon a party of natives in a 
fine large canoe, and after receiving their tama Eatu Pope demanded : 
"Where are you going"? The men, who seemed somewhat awe- 
stricken, answered that it had been their intention to travel up the river. 
Whereupon Eatu Pope told them that this they might do, but we would 
take their canoe and permit them to continue in ours. To this they 
acceded with the utmost cheerfulness, although our noble guide would 
neither heed our protests nor permit us to reward them for their service, 
saying simply, "I am a chief. You may if you choose pay me." In 
this manner we continued to improve our situation by " exchanging " 
with every canoe we met which happened to be better than our own, 
until finally our princely friend ordered a gay party of merry-makers 
out of a fine large skiff, which they cheerfully "exchanged" for our 
leaky canoes and departed singing happily, feeling honored indeed that 
this opportunity had come to them to serve the great chief Eatu Pope 
Seniloli; and thus suffering qualms of conscience, we sailed to our 
destination leaving a wake of confusion behind us. Moreover I forgot 
to mention that many natives had by Eatu Pope's orders been diverted 
from their intended paths and sent forward to announce the coming of 
himself and the " American chiefs." Thus does one of the Eoyal house 
of Mbau proceed through Fiji. 

At first sight such behavior must appear autocratic, to say the least, 
but it should be remembered that a high chief has it in his power fully 



I04 



TEE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



to recompense those about him, and this without the payment of a 
penny. Indeed, many intelligent natives still regret the introduction of 
money into their land, saying that all the white man's selfishness had 
been developed through its omnipotence. In Fiji to-day there are 
no poor, for such would be fed and given a house by those who lived 
beside them. The white man's callous brutality in ignoring the appeal 
of misery is incomprehensible to the natives of Fiji. "Progress" they 
have not in the sense that one man possesses vast wealth and many 
around him struggle helplessly, doomed to life-long poverty; nor have 
they ambition to toil beyond that occasional employment required to 
satisfy immediate wants. Yet if life be happy in proportion as the 
summation of its moments be contented, the Fijians are far happier than 
we. Old men and women rest beneath the shade of cocoa-palms and 
sing with the youths and maidens, and the care-worn faces and bent 
bodies of "civilization" are still unknown in Fiji. They still have 
something we have lost and never can regain. 

It is impossible to draw a line between personal service such as was 
rendered to Ratu Pope and a regular tax (lala) for the benefit of the 
entire community or the support of the communal government; and 
the recognition of this fact actuated the English to preserve much of the 
old system and to command the payment of taxes in produce, rather 
than in money. 

Land tenure in Fiji is a subject so complex that heavy volumes 
might be written upon it. In general it may be said that the chief 




The Chief's Ildusic at Nai;uka],ika, \'iti Li;\i; Islanh, Fiji. The white 
cowrie shells studding the projecting ridge pole and hanging pendant from the roof- 
beam indicate that the house is the residence of a chief. 



.4 HISTORY OF FIJI 105 



The Stkaxgee's House at Mbau in 1899. 

can sell no land without the consent of his tribe. Cultivated land 
belonged to the man who originally farmed it, and is passed undivided 
to all his heirs. Waste land is held in common. Native settlers who 
have been taken into the tribes from time to time have been permitted 
to farm some of the waste land, and for this privilege they and their 
heirs must pay a yearly tribute to the chief either in produce or in 
service. Thus this form of personal lala is simply rent. The whole 
subject of land-ownership has given the poor English a world of trouble, 
as one may see who cares to read the official reports of the numerous 
intricate cases that have come before the courts. 

For example, one party based their claims to land on the historic 
fact that their ancestors had eaten the chief of the original owners, and 
the solemn British court allowed the claim. 

Basil Thomson in his interesting work upon "The Fijians; a Study 
of the Decline of Custom," has given an authoritative summary of the 
present status of taxation and land tenure, land being registered imder 
a modification of the Australian Torrens system. 

In order to protect these child-like people from the avarice of our 
own race they are not permitted to sell their lands, and the greater 
portion of the area of Fiji is still held by the natives. The Hawaiian 
Islands now under our own rule furnish a sad contrast, for here the 
natives are reduced by poverty to a degraded state but little above that 
of peonage. The Fijians, on the other hand, may not sell, but may with 



io6 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

the consent of the commissioner of native affairs lease their lands for a 
period of not more than twenty years. 

The Fijians appear never to have been wholly without a medium of 
exchange^ for sperm-whale's teeth have always had a recognized pur- 
chasing power^ but are more especially regarded as a means of express- 
ing good will and honesty of purpose. A whale's tooth is as effective to 
secure compliance with the terms of a bargain as an elaborately en- 
graved bond would be with us. More commonly, however, exchanges 
are direct, each man bringing to the village green his taro, yaqona, 
yams or fish and exchanging with his neighbors ; the rare disputes being 
settled by the village chief. 

In traveling you will discover no hotels, but will be entertained in 
the stranger's houses, and in return for your host's hospitality you 
should make presents to the chief. Indeed to journey in good fashion 
you should be accompanied by a train of bearers carrying heavy bags full 
of purposed gifts, and nowhere in the world is the " rate per mile " 
higher than in Polynesia. 

As in all communities, including our own world of finance, a man's 
wealth consists not only in what he possesses but even more so in the 
number of people from whom he can beg or borrow. Wilkes records 
an interesting example of this, for he found that the rifle and other 
costly presents he had presented to King Tanoa were being seized upon 
by his (Tanoa's) nephew who as his vasu had a right to take whatever 
he might select from the king's possessions. Indeed, in order to keep his 
property in sight, Tanoa was forced to give it to his own sons, thus 




End ok the Stranger's House, Mbau, Fiji. 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 107 

escaping the rapacity of his nephew. The construction of the British 
law is such that a vasu who thus appropriates property to himself could 
be sued and forced to restore it, but not a single Fijian has yet been so 
mean as to bring such a matter into court. 

An individual as such can hardly be said to own property, for nearly 
all things belong to his family or clan, and are shared among cousins. 
This condition is responsible for that absence of personal ambition and 
that fatal contentment with existing conditions, which strikes the white 
man as so illogical, but which is nevertheless the dominant feature of 
the social fabric of the Polynesians, and which has hitherto prevented 
the introduction of "ideals of modern progress." The natives are 
happy; why work when every reasonable want is already supplied? 
None are rich in material things, but none are beggars excepting in the 
sense that all are such. No one can be a miser, a capitalist, a banker, 
or a "promoter" in such a community, and thieves are almost un- 
known. Indeed, the honesty of the Fijians is one of those virtues which 
has excited the comment of travelers. Wilkes, who loathed them as 
" condor-eyed savages," admits that the only thing which any native 
attempted to steal from the Peacock was a hatchet, and upon being 
detected the chief requested the privilege of taking the man ashore 
in order that he might be ro'asted and eaten. Theft was always 
severely punished by the chief; Maafu beating a thief with the stout 
stalk of a cocoanut leaf until the culprit's life was despaired of, and 
Tui Thakau wrapping one in a tightly wound rope so that not a muscle 
could move while the wretch remained exposed for an entire day to the 
heat of the sun. 

During Professor Alexander Agassiz's cruises in which he visited 
nearly every island of the Fijis, and the natives came on board by 
hundreds, not a single object was stolen, although things almost price- 
less in native estimation lay loosely upon the deck. Once, indeed, 
when the deck was deserted by both officers and crew and fully a 
hundred natives were on board, we found a man who had been gazing 
wistfully for half an hour at a bottle which lay upon the laboratory 
table. Somehow he had managed to acquire a shilling, a large coin 
in Fiji, and this he offered in exchange for the coveted bottle. One 
can never forget his shout of joy and the radiance of his honest face 
as he leaped into his canoe after having received it as a gift. 

Even the great chief Eatu Epele of Mbau beamed with joy when 
presented with a screw-capped glass tobacco jar, and Tui Thakau of 
Somo somo had a veritable weakness for bottles and possessed a large 
collection of these treasures. 

Intelligent and well-educated natives who know whereof they speak 
have told me that they desire not the white man's -system, entailing as 
it does untold privation and heart-burnings to the many that the few 



io8 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

may enjoy a surfeit of mere material things. As the natives say, " The 
white man possesses more than we, but his life is full of toil and 
sorrow, while our days are happy as they pass." 

Thus in the Pacific life is of to-day; the past is dead, and the 
future when it comes will pass as to-day is passing. Life is a dream, 
an evanescent thing, all but meaningless, and real only as is the murmur 
of the surf when the sea-breeze comes in the morning, and man awakens 
from the oblivion of night. 

Hoarded wealth inspires no respect in the Pacific, and indeed, were 
it discovered, its possession would justify immediate confiscation. Yet 
man must raise idols to satisfy his instinct to worship things above his 
acquisition, and thus rank is the more reverenced because respect for 
property is low. Even to-day there is something god-like in the pres- 
ence of the high chiefs, and none will cross the shadow of the king's 
house. Even in war did a common man kill a chief he himself was 
killed by men of his own tribe. 

As it is with property so with relationships. The family ties seem 
loosened; every child has two sets of parents, the adopted and the real, 
and relationships founded upon adoption are more respected than the 
real. Eank descends mainly through the mother. The son of a high 
chief by a common woman is a low chief, or even a commoner, but the 
son of a chieftainess by a common man is a chief. Curiously, there 
are no words in Fijian which are the exact equivalent of widow and 
widower. In the Marshall group the chief is actually the husband of 
all the women of his tribe, and as Lorimer Fison has said in his 
"Tales from Old Fiji," their designation and understanding of rela- 
tionships suggests that there was once a time when "all the women were 
the wives of every man, and all the men were the husbands of every 
woman," as indeed was almost the case in Tahiti at the time of Captain 
Cook's visit to this island. 

The social customs of Fiji are rarely peculiar to Fiji itself, but 
commonly show their relationship or identity with those of the Poly- 
nesians or Papuans. Curiously indeed, while the original stock of 
the Fijians was probably pure Papuan, their social and economic sys- 
tems are now dominated by Polynesian ideas, and only among the 
mountain tribes do we find a clear expression of the crude Papuan 
systems of life and thought. This in itself shows that under stimula- 
tion the I'ijians are capable of advancement in cultural ideals. 

This superposition of a Polynesian admixture upon a barbarous 
negroid stock may account for the anomalous character of the Fijians, 
for in the arts they equalled or in some things excelled the other island 
peoples of the Pacific, and some of their customs approached closely 
to the cultural level of the Polynesians, but in certain fundamental 
things they remained the most fiendish savages upon earth. Indeed 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 



109 




CocoANUT Fiber Sennit wound aeodnd tpe Root-beams of a Chief's House at 

Mbau, Fiji. 



we should expect that contact with a somewhat high culture would 
introduce new wants, and thus affect their arts more profoundly than 
their customs. 

In common with all primitive peojDles, their names of men and 
women are descriptive of some peculiarity or circumstance associated 
with the person named. Indeed, names were often changed after im- 
portant events in a person's life, thus our old friend Thakombau began 
life as Seru, then after the coup d'etat in which he slaughtered his 
father's enemies and reestablished Tanoa's rule in Mbau he was called 
Thakombau (evil to Mbau). At the time he also received another 



-— ^^ , .., .... ,. -!gg^--g_.. .-T'^Aivq;-— -— r ■ 1 r- ■ — : -^j--.™---— -— 


^1 


.^^K!5^>i>fisH||^^^^^^^^H|^^^^^^^BH 




1 ■'■■' 


■ : ':"«^^p|:^| 


i8»«i,... ,,,„«.., ...,—. - 



iNTEItlOR OF THE CHIEF'S HOUSE AT NaBUKALUKA, FIJI, SHOWING THE YAQUONA BOWL 

AND Ceremonial Fan. 



no THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

name Thikinovu (centijDede) in allusion to his stealtliiness in approach- 
ing to bite his enemy, biit this designation, together with his "mis- 
sionary" name " Ebenezer," did not survive the test of usage. Miss 
Gordon Gumming gives an interesting list of Fijian names translated 
into English. For women they were such as Spray of the Coral Eeef, 
Queen of Parrot's Land, Queen of Strangers, Smooth Water, Wife of 
the Morning Star, Mother of Her Grandchildren, Ten Whale's Teeth, 
Mother of Cockroaches, Lady Nettle, Drinker of Blood, Waited For, 
Eose of Eewa, Lady Thakombau, Lady Flag, etc. The men's names 
were such as The Stone (eternal) God, Great Shark, Bad Earth, Bad 
Stranger, New Child, More Dead Man's Flesh, Abode of Treachery, 




A Meke in the Chief's House at Kambaka, Fiji. 

Not Quite Cooked, Die Out of Doors, Empty Fire, Fire in the Bush, 
Eats Like a God, King of Gluttony, 111 Cooked, Dead Man, Eevenge, 
etc. 

In the religion of a people we have the most reliable clue to the 
history of their progress in culture and intelligence, for religions even 
when unwritten are potent to conserve old conceptions, and thus their 
followers advance beyond them, as does the intelligence of the twentieth 
century look pityingly upon the conception of the cruel and jealous 
God of the Old Testament, whose praises are nevertheless still sung in 
every Christian church. Thus in Tahiti the people were not cannibals, 
but the gods still appeared in the forms of birds that fed upon the 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 1 1 1 

bodies of the sacrificed. Tlie eye of the victim was, indeed, offered to 
the chief, who raised it to his lips but did not eat it. In Samoa also 
where the practise of cannabalism was very rare and indulged in only 
under great provocation, some of the gods remained cannibals, and the 
surest way of appeasing any god was to be laid upon the stones of a 
cold oven. In Tahiti and Samoa, while most of the gods Avere malev- 
olent, a few were kindly disposed towards mortals; in Fiji, however, 
they were all dreaded as the most powerful, sordid, cruel and vicious 




The Paper Mulbeeey fkoji the Inxer Baek of which Tapa is made. 



cannibal ghosts that have ever been conjured into being in the realm 
of thought. 

All over the Pacific from New Zealand to Japan, and from New 
Guinea to Hawaii, ancestor-worship forms the backbone of every 
religion as clearly as it did in Greece or Eome. There are everywhere 
one or more very ancient gods who may always have existed and from 
whom all others are descended. Next in order of reverence, although 
not always in power, come their children, and finally the much more 



112 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



numerous grandchildren and remote descendants of these oldest and 
highest gods. Finally, after many generations, men of chieftain's rank 
were born to the gods. Thus a common man could never attain the 
rank of a high chief, for such were the descendants of the gods, while 
commoners were created out of other clay and designed to be servants 
to the chiefs. 

But the process of gocl-making did not end with the appearance 
of men, for great chiefs and warriors after death became kalou yalo, or 
spirits, and often remained upon earth a menace to the unwary who 
might offend them. Curiousl3^ these deified mortals might suffer a 
second death which AA^ould result in their utter annihilation, and while 
in Fiji we heard a tale of an old chief who had met with the ghost of 




YaquonAj or Kava, Plants growing in a Fijian's Garden. The roots are used in 
brewing the drink called yaquona in Fiji, and kava in Samoa. 



his dead enemy and had killed him for the second and last time; the 
club which served in this miraculous victory having been hung up in the 
Mbure as an object of veneration. 

Of a still lower order were the ghosts of common men or of animals, 
and most dreaded of all was the vengeful spirit of the man who had 
been devoured. The ghosts of savage Fiji appear all to have been 
malevolent and fearful beings, whereas those of the more cultured Poly- 
nesians were some of them benevolent. As Ellis says of the Tahitian 
mythology : 

Each lovely island was made a sort of fairyland and the spells of enchant- 
ment were thrown over its varied scenes. The sentiment of the poet that 

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth, 
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep ' ' 



- .; A- HISTORY OF FIJI 1 1 3 

was one familiar to their minds, and it is impossible not to feel interested in 
& people who were accustomed to consider themselves surrounded by invisible 
intelligences, and who recognized in the rising sun, the mild and silver moon, 
the shooting star, the meteor 's transient flame, the ocean 's roar, the tempest 's 
blast, or the evening breeze the movernents of mighty spirits. 

The gods and ghosts of Fiji often entered into the bodies of animals 
or men, especially idiots. 

Thus wheii the Carnegie Institution Expedition arrived at the 
Murray Islands in Torres Straits, the scientific staff were much pleased 
at the decided evidences of respect shown by the natives until it came 
out that the Islanders considered their white guests to be semi-idiots, 
and hence powerful sorcerers to be placated. Fijian religion had de- 
veloped into the oracular stage, and the priest after receiving prayers 
and offerings would on occasions be entered into by the god. Tremors 
would overspread his body, the flesh of which would creep horribly. 
His veins would swell,Jiis eyeballs protrude with excitement and his 
voice, becoming quavering and unnatural, would whine out strange 
words, Avords spoken by the god himself and unknown to the priest 
who as his unconscious agent was overcome by violent convulsions. 
Slowly the contortions grew less and with a start the priest would 
awaken, dash his club upon the ground and the god would leave him. 
It ma}'' well be imagined that the priests were the most powerful agents 
of the chiefs in forwarding the interests of their masters, for, as in 
ancient Greece or Eome, nothing of importance was undertaken without 
first consulting the oracle. 

Surrounded by multitudes of demons, ghosts, and genii who were 
personified in everything about him, religion was the most powerful 
factor in controlling Fijian life and politics. In fact, it entered deeply 
into every act the native performed. The gods were more monstrous 
in every way than man, but in all attributes only the exaggerated 
counterparts of Fijian chiefs. 

War was constantly occurring among these gods and spirits, and 
even high gods could die by accident or be killed by those of equal 
rank so that at least one god, Samu, was thus dropped out of the 
mythology in 1847. 

Ndengei was the oldest and greatest, but not the most universally 
reverenced god. He lived in a cavern in the northeastern end of Viti 
Levu, and usually appeared as a snake, or as a snake's head with a 
body of stone symbolizing eternal life. Among the sons and grandsons 
of ^dengei were Eoko Mbati-ndua, the one-toothed lord; a fiend with 
a huge tooth projecting from his lower Jaw and curving over the top of 
his head. He had bat's wings armed with claws and was usually re- 
garded as a harbinger of pestilence. The mechanic's god. was eight- 
handed, gluttony had eighty stomachs, wisdom possessed eight eyes. 
Other gods were the adulterel, the abductor of women of rank and 



114 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

beauty, the rioter, the brain-eater, the killer of men, the slaughter god, 
the god of leprosy, the giant, the spitter of miracles, the gods of fisher- 
men and of carpenters, etc. One god hated mosquitoes and drove them 
away from the place where he lived. The names and stations of the 
gods are described by Thomas Williams, who has given the most detailed 
account of the old religion. 

As with all peoples whose religion is barbarous, there were ways of 
obtaining sanctuary and many a man has saved his life by taking ad- 
vantage of the tabus which secured their operation. No matter how 
desirous your host might be of murdering you, as long as you remained 
a guest under his roof you were safe, although were you only a few 
yards away from his door he would eagerly attack you. 

But not only did the Fijians live in a world peopled by witches, 
wizards, prophets, seers and fortune-tellers, but there was a perfect army 
of fairies which overran the whole land, and the myths concerning 
which would have filled volumes could they ever have been gathered. 
The gnome-like spirits of the mountains had peaked heads, and were 
of a vicious, impish disposition, but were powerless to injure any one 
who carried a fern leaf in his hand. 

Sacred relics such as famous clubs, stones possessing miraculous 
powers, etc., were sometimes kept in Fijian temples, but there were 
no idols such as were prayed to by the Polynesians. 

The fearful alternatives of heaven and hell were unknown to the 
Fijians. They believed in an eternal existence for men, animals, and 
even canoes and other inanimate things, but the future life held forth 
no prospect either of reward for virtues or punishment for evil acts 
committed while alive. So certain were they of a future life that they 
always referred to the dead as " the absent ones," and their land of 
shades (Mbulu) was not essentially different from the world they lived 
in. Indeed, their chief idea of death was that of rest, for as William's 
states, they have an adage : " Death is easy : Of what use is life ? To 
die is rest." 

There were, however, certain precautions the Fijian felt it advis- 
able to take before entering the world to come. If he had been so un- 
fortunate as not to have killed a man, woman or child, his duty would 
be the dismal one of pounding filth throughout eternity, and disgrace- 
ful careers awaited those whose ears were not bored or women who were 
not tatooed upon parts covered by the liku. Moreover, should a wife 
not accompany him (be strangled at the time of his death) his condi- 
dition would be the dismal one of a spirit without a cook. Thirdly, 
as one was at the time of death so would the spirit be in the next world. 
It was therefore an advantage to die young, and people often preferred 
to be buried alive, or strangled, than to survive into old age. Lastly 
and most important, one must not die a bachelor, for suph are invariably 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 115 

dashed to pieces by Nangganangga, even if they should succeed in elud- 
ing the grasp of the Great "Woman, Lewa-levu, who haunts the path of 
the departed spirits and searches for the ghosts of good-looking men. 
Let us imagine, however, that our shade departs this life in the best of 
form, young, married, with the lobes of his ears pierced, not danger- 
ously handsome and a slayer of at least one human being. He starts 
upon the long journey to the Valhalla of Fiji. Soon he comes to a 
spiritual Pandanus at which he must throw the ghost of the whale's 
tooth which was placed in his hand at time of burial. If he succeeds 
in hitting the Pandanus, he may then wait until the spirit of his 
strangled wife comes to join him, after which he boards the canoe of 
the Fijian Charon and proceeds to Nambanggatai, where until 1847 
there dwelt the god Samu, and after his death Samuyalo " the killer of 
souls." 

This god remains in ambush in some spiritual mangrove bushes 
and thrusts a reed within the ground upon the path of the ghost as a 
warning not to pass the spot. Should the ghost be brave he raises 
his club in defiance, whereupon Samuyalo appears, club in hand, and 
gives battle. If killed in this combat, the ghost is cooked and eaten by 
the soul killer, and if wounded he must wander forever among the 
mountains, but if the ghost be victorious over the god he may pass on to 
be questioned by Ndengei, who may consign him either to Mburotu, the 
highest heaven, or drop him over a precipice into a somewhat inferior 
but still tolerable abode, Murimuria. This ISTdengei does in accord- 
ance with the caprice of the moment and without reference either to 
the virtues or the faults of the deceased. Thus of those who die only 
a few can enter the higher heaven for the Great Woman and the Soul 
destroyer overcome the greater number of those who dare to face them. 
As for the victims of cannibal feasts, their souls are devoured by the 
gods when their bodies are eaten by man. 

In temperament and ambitions the spirits of the dead remained as 
they were upon earth, but of more monstrous growth in all respects, 
resembling giants greater and more vicious than man. War and can- 
nibalism still prevailed in heaven, and the character of the inhabitants 
seems to have been fiendish or contemptible as on earth ; for the spirits 
of women who were not tattooed were unceasingly pursued by their more 
fortunate sisters, who tore their bodies with sharp shells, often making 
mince-meat of them for the gods to eat. Also the shade of any one 
whose ears had not been pierced was condemned to carry a masi log 
over his shoulder and submit to the eternal ridicule of his fellow spirits. 

Altogether, this religion seems to have been as sordid, brutal and 
vicious as was the ancestral negroid stock of the Fijians. Connected 
with it there was, however, a rude mythology, clumsy but romantic, too 
much of which has been lost ; for the natives of to-day have largely for- 



ii6 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

gotten its stories or are ashamed to repeat it to the whites. In recent 
times the natives have tended to make their follc-lore conform to Biblical 
stories, or to adapt them to conditions of the present day. The interest- 
ing subject of the lingering influence of old beliefs upon the life of the 
natives of to-day has engaged the attention of Basih Thomson in " Tlie 
Fijians, a Study of the Decay of Custom." 

As in every British colony, the people are taught to respect the law. 
Sentences of imprisonment are meted out to natives for personal offences 
which if committed by white men would be punished by small fines, but 
the reason for this is that in the old native days such acts were avenged 
by murder, and it is to prevent crime that a prison term has been or- 
dained. The natives take their imprisonment precisely as boys in 
boarding school regard a flogging, the victim commonly becoming quite 
a liero and losing no caste among his fellows. Indeed it is a common 
sight to see bands of from four to eight stalwart " convicts " a mile or 
more from the prison marching unguarded through the woods as they 
sing merrily on their way "home" to the jail. Once I recall seeing 
two hundred prisoners, all armed with long knives, engaged in cutting 
weeds along the roadside, chanting happily as they slashed, while a 
solitary native dressed only in a waist-cloth and armed only with a 
club stood guard at one end of the line, and this not near the prison, but 
in a lonely wood fully a mile from the nearest house. 

In 1874, the British undertook the unique task of civilizing without 
exploiting a barbarous and degraded race which was drifting hopelessly 
into ruin. They began the solution of this complex problem by ar- 
resting the entire race and immuring them within the protecting walls 
of a system which recognized as its cardinal principle that the natives 
were unfit to think or act for themselves. For a generation the 
Fijians have been in a prison wherein they have become the happiest 
and best behaved captives upon earth. During this time they have be- 
come reconciled to a life of peace, and have forgotten the taste of 
human flesh ; and while they cherish no love for the white man, they 
feel the might of his law and know that his decrees are as finalities of 
fate. All are serving life sentences to the white man's will, and the 
fire of their old ambition has cooled into the dull embers of resignation 
and then died into the apathy of contentment with things that are. 
Worse still, they have grown fond of their prison world, and the most 
pessimistic feature in the Fijian situation of to-day is the evident fact 
that there is almost no discontent among the natives. Old things have 
withered and decayed, but new ambition has not been born. 

It is in no spirit of criticism of British policy that I have written 
the above paragraph for it was absolutely necessary that the race should 
"calm down" for a generation at least before it could be trusted to 
arise. Now, however, there are no more old chiefs whose memories 



A HISTORY OF FIJI 117 

hark back to days of savagery, and now for the first and only time has 
come the critical period in the unique governmental experiment the 
British have undertaken to perform, for now is the time when the child 
must learn to walk alone and the support of guardian arms must in 
kindness be withdrawn, else there must be nurtured but a cripple, not 
a man. 

Among the generation of to-day the light of a new ambition must 
appear in Fiji or the race shall dwindle to its death. No real progress 
has been made by the Fijians; they have received much from their 
teachers, but have given nothing in return. They are in the position of 
a youth whose schooling has Just been finished, life and action lie before 
him; will he awaken to his responsibility, develop his latent talent, 
character and power, and recompense his teachers by achievement, or 
will he sink into the apathy of a vile content ? 

The situation in Fiji is one of peculiar delicacy for the desire for 
better things must arise among the Fijians themselves, and should it 
once appear, the paternalism of the present government must be wisely 
withdrawn to permit of more and more freedom in proportion as the 
natives may become competent to think and act rightly for themselves. 
A cardinal difficulty is the unfortunate fact that the natives desire no 
change, and even if individually discontented and ambitious, they know 
of no profession, arts or trades to which they might turn with hope 
of fortune. The establishment of manual training schools wherein 
money-making trades should be taught, if possible by native teachers, 
is sorely needed in Fiji. 

At present there is too little freedom of thought in Fiji; fear of the 
chief and of Samuyalo's club has been replaced by fear of the European 
and his hell. Free, fearless thought is the father of high action, and 
while their minds remain steeped in an apathy of dread there can be no 
soil in which the seed of independence can germinate. 

Yet it is still possible that the Fijians may attain civilization. Of 
all the archipelagoes of Polynesia, Fiji alone may still be called the 
"Isles of Hope." As one who has known and grown to love these 
honest, hospitable, simple people, I can only hope that the day is not 
far distant when a leader may arise among them who will turn their 
faces toward the light of a brighter sky, and their hands to a worthier 
task than has ever j^et been performed in Polynesia. 

Yet why civilize them? Often does one ask oneself this question, 
but the answer comes as the voice of fate, " they must attain civilization 
or they must die." Should the population continue to decline at its 
present rate, the time is imminent when the dark-skinned men of Fiji 
will be not the natives, but the swarming progeny of the coolies of 
Calcutta. 

KoAvhere over all the wide Pacific have the natives been more wisely 



ii8 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

or unselfishly ruled than in Fiji, yet even here native life seems to be 
growing less and less purposeful year by year. In time it is hoped a 
reaction may set in and that with the decline of communism new ambi- 
tions may replace the old, but then will come the problem of the rich 
and the poor — a thing unknown in Fijian life to-day. 

Hardly the first lessons in civilization have been taught in Polynesia, 
yet who can predict the noon day, should even the faintest glow appear 
in native hope. In former ages the Japanese were a barbarous insular 
people, and as in our own civilization the traditions and habits of rude 
Aryan ancestors still color our fundamental thoughts so in Japan we 
find evidences of a culture essentially similar to that of the Pacific 
Islands of to-day. The ancient ancestor worship of Japan is strangely 
like that of the tropical Pacific with its gods, the ghosts of long de- 
parted chiefs, and its high chief a living god to-day. Moreover in the 
Pacific Islands the house consists of but a single room, and such to-day 
is essentially the case in Japan, save only that delicate paper screens 
divide its originally unitary floor-space into temporary compartments. 
As in the South Seas, matting still covers the floor of the Japanese 
house, its roof is thatched, and is constructed before the sides are made, 
there is no chimney, the fire-place is an earthen space upon the floor 
or is sustained within an artistically molded bronze brazier, the refined 
descendant of the cruder hearth. In Polynesia as in Japan one seats 
oneself anywhere in tailor-fashion upon the floor, and upon this floor the 
meals are served, and here one sleeps at night, nor will the women par- 
take of food in the presence of the men. In essential fundamental 
things of life the Japanese show their kinship in custom and tradition 
to the insular peoples of Asiatic origin now occupying the Pacific, and 
if Japan has attained to so great a height in culture and civilization, 
why may we not hope for better days for the South Sea Islanders ? 



[Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 105-123, 

November, 1915. 



PAPUA, WHEBE THE STONE-AGE LINGEKS 

By De. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

WITH their undaunted sj^irit for braving the wilds, the English 
entered New Guinea in 1885. For centuries the great island 
had remained a mere outline upon the map, the fever-haunted glades of 
its vast swamps and the broken precipices of its mountain ranges having 
defied exploration, more than the morose and savage character of its 
inhabitants. Even in the summer of 1913, Massy Baker, the explorer, 
discovered a lake probabl}^ 100 miles or more in shore-line, which had 
remained hidden in the midst of the dark forests of the Fly and Strick- 
land Eiver regions, and here savages still in the stone age, who had 
never seen a white man, measured the potency of their weapons against 
the modern rifle. 

To-day there are vast areas upon which the foot of the white man 
has not yet trodden, and of all the regions in the tropical world New 
Guinea beckons with most alluring fascination to him to whom adven- 
ture is dearer than life. 

Far back in the dawn of European exploration, the Portuguese 
voyager, Antonio de Abreu, may have seen the low shores of western 
New Guinea, but it is quite certain that sixteen 5^ears later, in 1527, 
Don Jorge de Meneses cruised along the coast and observed the wooly- 
headed natives whom he called " Papuas." The name " New Guinea " 
was bestowed upon the island by the Spanish captain, Ynigo Ortz de 
Eetes, in 1545, when he saw the negroid natives of its northern shores. 

Then there came and passed some of the world's greatest navigators. 
Torres wandering from far Peru, to unknowingly discover the strait 
which bears his name; Dampier, the buccaneer-adventurer, and, in 1768, 
the cultured, esthetic Bougainville, who was enraptured by the beauty 
of the deep forest-fringed fjords of the northeastern coast. Cook, 
greatest of all geographers, mapped the principal islands and shoals 
of the intricate Torres Strait in 1770; and a few years later came 
Captain Bligh, the resourceful leader of his faithful few, crouch- 
ing in their frail sail boat that had survived many a tempest; since the 
mutineers of the Bounty had cast them adrift in the mid-Pacific. In 
the early years of the nineteenth century the scientifically directed 
Astrolabe arrived, under the command of Dumont D'Urville, and, later. 
Captain Owen Stanley in the Rattlesnake, with Huxley as his zoologist. 

119 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




Natives of Boika Village, British New Guinea. The photographs illustrating the 
article were taken by the author in November, 1913. 



Then, in 1858, came Alfred Eiissel Wallace, the codiscoverer of Dar- 
winism, who, by the way, is said to have been the first Englishman who 
ever actually resided in New Guinea. 

The daring explorers and painstaking surveyors came and Avent, 
but the great island remained a land of dread and mystery, guarded by 
the jagged reefs of its eastern shores, and the shallow mud flats, stretch- 
ing far to sea-ward beyond the mouths of the great rivers of its southern 



PAPUA, WFIERE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS 121 

coast. So inaccessible was Papua that even the excellent harbor of Port 
Moresb}^, the site of the present capital, was not discovered until 1873. 
One has but to stifle for a while in the heav}^ air that flows lifeless and 
fetid over the lowlands as if from a steaming furnace, or to scent the rank 
odors of the dark swamps, where for centuries malaria must linger, to 
appreciate the reason for the long-delayed European settlement of the 
countr3^ But those who blaze the path of colonial progress are not to be 
deterred b}^ temperatures or smells ; let us remember that Batavia, " the 
white man's gravej^ard," is now one of the world's great commercial 
centers; and Jamaica, the old fever camjD of the British army, is now a 
health resort for tourists. 

Papua, the land of the tired eyes and the earnest face, of the willing 
spirit and the weary body, waning as strength fails year by year in 
malaria and heat, the land wherein the heart aches for the severed ti.s 
of wife and home; its history has hardly yet begun, but the reward of 
generations of heroism will be the conquest of another empire where 
England's high standards of freedom are to be raised anew. A victory of 
peace it is to be, as noble as any yet achieved in war; and great though 
its death roll, and forgotten though the workers be, the fruits of their 
labors will bless that better world Great Britain is preparing for those 
of ages yet to come. 

There are great resources in. Papua with its area of 90,500 square 
miles. Untrodden forests where the dark soil moulders beneath the 
everlasting shade; swamps bearing a harvest of thousands of sago and 
nipa palms, and mountains in a riot of contorted peaks rising to a 
height of 13,200 feet in the Owen Stanley range. 

It is still a country of surprises, as when petroleum fields, probably 
1,000 square miles in area, were discovered only about four years ago 
along the Vailala River, the natives having concealed their knowledge of 
the bubbling gas springs through fear of offending the evil spirits of the 
place. It is evident that although the country has been merely glanced 
over, there are both agricultural and mineral resources of a promising 
nature in Papua. It remains but for modern medicine to overcome the 
infections of the tropics for the region to rise into prominence as one 
of the self-supporting colonies of the British empire. 

The early history of British occupation centers around the striking 
personality of James Chalmers, the great-hearted, broad-minded, mis- 
sionary, one of the most courageous who ever devoted his life to ex- 
tending the brotherhood of the white man's ideals. Chafing, as a young 
man, under the petty limitations of his mission in the Cook Islands, he 
sought New Guinea, as being the wildest and most dangerous field in 
the tropical Pacific. Here, for twenty-five years, he devoted his mighty 
soul to the work of introducing the rudiments of civilization and 
Christianity to the most sullen and dangerous savages upon earth. 



122 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS 123 

Scores of times his life hung in the balance of native caprice ; wives and 
friends died by his side^ victims to the malignant climate and to native 
spears, while he seemed to possess a charmed life; until, true to his 
prediction, he was murdered by the cannibals of Dopina at the mouth of 
the Fly Eiver in 1901. 

Hundreds of scattered tribes had learned to revere their great leader 
" Tamate," as they called him, who brought peace and prosperity to his 
followers. Yet a danger to Papua that he himself foresaw and did all in 
his power to avert came as a result of the introduction of the very civili- 
zation of which he was the champion, for with peace came new wants 
that the most unscrupulous of traders at once sought to supply at prices 
ruinous to the social and moral welfare of the natives. 

Also, the proximity of Queensland threatened to become a menace ; 
for Chalmers himself was well aware of the dark history of the "black- 
bird trade" wherein practical slavery was forced upon the indentured 
laborers, lured from their island homes to toil as hopeless debtors upon 
the i^ustralian plantations.- A government of the natives for the native 
interests he desired; not one administered from the Australian main- 
land in the interest of alien whites. The hopes of Chalmers were only 
partially realized, for Papua is still only a territory of Australia. 

In most respects this condition appears to be unfortunate. The 
crying needs of a new country are usually peculiarly local and not likely 
to be appreciated by a distant ruling power. Moreover, Australia is 
itself an undeveloped land and requires too large a proportion of its 
own •capital for expansion at home to be a competent protector of a 
colony across the sea. One feels that Papuan development might have 
|)roceeded with greater smoothness had the colony been more directly 
under the British empire, rather than an Australian dependency. 

The strategic necessity that Australia should command both the 
northern and the southern shores of Torres Straits might still have been 
secured Avithout the sacrifice of any important initiative in matters of 
government upon the part of Papua. 

The cardinal evil that Chalmers feared has, however, been averted. 
The natives still own 97^ per cent, of the entire land area, and wise laws 
guard them in this precious possession, and aim to protect them from 
all manner of unjust exploitation. It is much to the credit of the gov- 
ernment that the cleanest native villages and the most healthy, ambitious 
and industrious tribes, are those nearest the white settlements. Contact 
between the races has resulted in the betterment, not in the degradation, 
of the Papuan natives. 

The touch of a master hand is apparent in a multitude of details in 
managing the natives of Papua ; and it is of interest to see that in broad 
essentials the plan of government is adapted from that which the Eng- 



124 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




Natives of Boiea Village. 



lish have put to the test of practise in Fiji ; the modifications heing of 
a character designed to meet the conditions peculiar to Melanesia, 
wherein the chiefs are relatively unimportant in comparison with their 
role in the social systems of the Polynesians and Fijians. 

Foremost in the shaping of the destiny of Papua stands the com- 
manding figure of Sir William Macgregor, administrator and lieutenant 
governor from 1888 to 1898. As a .young man Macgregor was govern- 
ment physician in Fiji, where he became prominent not only as a com- 



PAPUA, WIIEEE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS i 25 

petent guardian of the health of the natives^ but as a leader in the sup- 
pression of the last stronghold of cannibalism along the Singatoka Eiver. 
In Papua his tireless spirit found a wide field for high endeavor, 
and upon every department of the government one finds to-day the 
stamp of his powerful personality. Nor did he remain closeted in Port 
Moresb}'', a stranger to the races of his vast domains, for over the highest 
mountains and through the densest swamps his expeditions forced their 
wa}^; the Great Governor always in the van. It was thus that he con- 




Belles of Boiea Village. 



126 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



r-. 




^^ 




^^r^' 










'^^3 


h- '. - 


■"^^ . IJB^I^^M 


, 1 , 


l?^9 


I'.h ,. 




PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE-AGE LIXGERS 



127 




Baeakau Village. 

quered the fierce Tugeri of the Dutch border, who for generations had 
been the terror of the coasts ; and wherever his expeditions passed, peace 
followed, and the law of the British magistrate supplanted the caprice 
of the sorcerer. 

But his hardest fight was not with the mountain wilds or the malari- 
ous morasses. It was to secure from the powerful ones of his own race 
the privileges of freemen for the natives of Papua. 




Bakakau Village. 



128 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 







Hakuabada Village, Pokt Moeesby. 

In his youth he had seen the blessings that came with the advent of 
British rule in Fiji; and here^ in broad New Guinea, upon a vaster 
■scale, he strove to make fair play the dominant note in the white man's 
treatment of a savage race. 

-■ Arrayed against Chalmers and Macgregor were conservatism and 
suspicion founded in ancient precedent, and a commercial avarice that 
saw in native exploitation the readiest means to convert New Guinea 
into a "white man's country." Aversion there was also in high places^to 
embarking upon a possibly fruitless experiment, involving generations 
of labor and expense for a remote and uncertain harvest. Chalmers and 
Macgregor, however, through the force of their high convictions and 
the wisdom of their wide experience, won the great fight for fairness; 
for civilization's cardinal victories are those, not of the soldier, but of 
the civil servant who dares risk his reputation and his all for those things 
he deems just and generous ; and when Papua comes to erect statues to 
her great leaders, those of these two patriots must surely occupy the 
highest places, as champions of the liberties of the weak. The noble 
policy of Macgregor is still, and let us hope it long may be, the keynote of 
the administration in Papua, which to-day is being ably carried forward 
under the great governor's disciple, the Honorable Jolm H. P. Murray. 

The proclamation given by Captain Erskine in 1884 declared that a 
British Protectorate had become essential for the safeguarding of tlie 
lives and property of the natives of New Guinea and for the purpose of 
preventing the occupation of the country by persons whose proceedings 



PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS 129 

might lead to injustice, strife and bloodshed, or whose illegitimate trade 
might endanger the liberties and alienate the lands of the natives. 

It is, however, one thing for a government to declare its altruistic 
intentions, but often quite another to carry them into effect. 

In Papua, every effort has been made to ^arevent robbery of the 
natives by unscrupulous whites. The natives are firmly secured in the 
possession of their lands, which they can neither sell, lease nor dispose 
of, except to the government itself. Thus the natives and the govern- 
ment are the only two landlords in the country. To acquire land in 
Papua, the European settler must rent it from the government, for he 
is not permitted to acquire fee simple rights. The whites are thus 
tenants of the government, and are subject to such rules and regulations 
as their landlord may decree. The tenant is, however, recognized as 
the creator and owner of any improvements he may erect upon the land, 
and, at the expiration of his lease, the government imdertakes to pay 
him a fair compensation for such improvements, provided he has lived 
up to the letter of regulations respecting his tenure. 

For agricultural land a merely nominal rental is demanded, ranging 
from nothing for the first ten years to a final maximum of six pence per 
acre; yet this system has had the effect of retarding European settle- 
ment, for, although its area is twice that of Cuba, Papua had but 1,064 
whites in 1912, and only one one hundred and seventj^-fourth of the 
territory is held under lease. 




Hanuabada Village. 



130 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




■•■KSSfj 




PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS 13 ^ 

Men of the type who can conquer the primeval forests and create 
industries prefer to own their land outright, and are apt to resent the 
restrictions of complex government regulations, however wisely admin- 
istered. Socialism, while it may in some measure be desirable in old 
and settled communities, serves but to dull that sense of personal free- 
dom which above all spurs the pioneer onward to success in a wild 
and dangerous region. 

Possibly in the end, the government may find it advantageous to per- 
mit certain lands to be acquired by Europeans, in fee simple; for un- 
til this is done the settlement of the country must proceed with ex- 
treme slowness. Moreover, mere tenants owning nothing but their- im- 
provements, and even these being subject to government appraisement, 
may be unduly tempted to drain, rather than to develop, the resources 
of the land they occupy. 

But the chief aim of the Papuan government is to introduce civiliza- 
tion among the natives, and a slow increase in the European population 
is of primary necessity to the accomplishment of this result. 

At present the natives are not taxed, the chief sources of revenue 
being derived from the customs duties upon imports, the bulk of which 
are consumed by the Europeans, and this source of income is supple- 
mented by an annual grant of about £25,000 from the Australian Com- 
monwealth, but, due to the duties upon food and necessities, the cost 
of living is higher than it should be in a new country. 

Judging, however, from the experience of the English in Fiji and 
of the Dutch in Java, the natives would be benefited rather than op- 
pressed* by a moderate poll tax to be paid in produce, thus developing 
habits of industry, and in some measure offsetting the evil effects of 
that insidious apathy which follows upon the sudden abolition of native 
warfare. 

Every effort should also be made to encourage and educate the 
Papuans in the production and sale of manufactured articles. One 
must regret the loss of many arts and crafts among the primitive peo- 
ples of the Pacific, which, if properly fostered under European pro- 
tection to insure a market and an adequate payment for their wares, 
would have been a source of revenue and a factor of immeasurable im- 
port in developing that self respect and confidence in themselves which 
the too sudden modification of their social and religious systems is certain 
to destroy. The ordinary mission schools are deficient in this respect, 
devoting their major energies to the "three E's" and to religious in- 
struction, and, while it is pleasing to observe a boy whose father was a 
cannibal extracting cube roots, one can not but conclude that the acquisi- 
tion of some money-making trade would be more conducive to his 
happiness in after life. 

It is not too much to say that the chief problem in dealing with 



132 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




XaTIVKS (IK I'.AKAKAT VlI,LA(iK. 



an erstwhile savage race is to overcome the universal loss of interest and 
decline in energy which inevitably follows upon the development of that 
semblance of civilization which is enforced with the advent of the white 



PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS 133 

man. The establishment of manual training schools wherein arts and 
crafts which may be profitably iDractised by the natives as life-professions, 
is a first essential to the salvation of the race. These schools should and 
would in no manner interfere with the religious teaching received from 
missionaries, but Avould indeed be a most potent factor in the spread of 
' true Christianity among the natives. Whether Christianity be true or 
false does not affect the case, for the natives are destined to be dominated 
by Christian peoples, and it primarily essential that they should under- 
stand at least the rudiments of Christian ideals and behavior. 

The realization of the importance of training them to the pursuit of 
useful arts and trades, which would enable the natives to become self- 
supporting in the European sense, has been perceived by certain thinkers 
among the missionaries themselves, and in certain regions efforts are 
being made the success of which should revolutionize our whole method 
of dealing with the problem of introducing civilization among a primi- 
tive people. 

Keep their minds active and their hands employed in self-support- 
ing work and their morals and religion will safely fall into accord with 
Christian standards. 

Up to the present native education has been left to the devoted 
efforts of the missionaries, Avho have more than 10,000 pupils under 
their charge, but the time is coming when the government should co- 
operate in establishing trade schools wherein crafts, providing life- 
vocations to the natives, may be taught. 

There may be more than 275,000 natives in Papua, but, due to lack 
of knowledge of the country, the actual number is unknown. 

Among the mountain fastnesses, defending themselves in tree-houses, 
one finds a frizzly-headed black negrito-like race hardly more than five 
feet in height. These are probably remnants of the " pigmy " pre-Dra- 
vidian or Negrito-Papuan element, which constituted the most ancient 
inhabitants of the island and who long ago were driven inland from the 
coveted coast. 

The burly negroid Papuans of the Great Eiver deltas of western 
Papua difi'er widely from the lithe, active, brown-skinned, mop-headed 
natives of the eastern half of the southern coast ; and Professors Haddon 
and Seligmann have decided that in eastern Kew Guinea many Proto- 
Polynesian, Melanesian and Malayan immigrants have mingled their 
blood with that of the more primitive Papuans. Thus there are many 
complexly associated ethnic elements in ISTew Guinea, and often people 
living less than a hundred miles apart can not understand one another ; 
in fact, each village has its peculiar dialect. Social customs and cul- 
tural standards in art and manufacture vary greatly from the same 
cause, and each tribe has soma remarkable individual characteristics. 
In the Fly-Eiver region, the village consists of a few huge houses with 



134 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE-AGE LINGERS 135 

mere stalls for the families, wliicli crowd for defence under the shelter 
of a single roof. Along the southern side of the eastern end of the 
island, however, each family has its own little thatched hut, and these 
are often huilt for defense upon piling over the sea, reminding one of the 
manner of life of the prehistoric Swiss-lake dwellers. 

Nearly 12,000 natives are at present employed hy the whites as in- 
dentured laborers in Papua, their terms of service ranging from 
three years, upon agricultural work, to not more than eighteen months 
in mining. Their wages range from about $1.50 to $5.00 per month, 
and all payments must be made in the presence of a magistrate and in 
coin or approved bank notes. 

At every turn both employer and employed are wisely safeguarded ; 
the native sufEering imprisonment for desertion, and the employer be- 
ing prohibited from getting the blacks into debt, or from treating them 
harshly or unjustly. Their enlistment must be voluntary and executed 
in the presence of a magistrate, and, after their term of service, the 
employer is obliged to return them to their homes. 

One is impressed with the many manifestations of a fair degree of 
efficiency on the part of the native laborers, who are really good plan- 
tation hands and resourceful sailors. In fact, trade has always been 
practised to a considerable extent by the shore tribes, the pottery of the 
eastern end of the coast being annually exchanged for the sago produced 
by the natives of the Fly Eiver Delta. It is a picturesque sight to see 
the large lakatois, or trading canoes, creeping along in the shadow of the 
palm-fringed shores under the great wall of the mountains, the lakatoi 
consisting of a raft composed of six or more canoes lashed together 
side by side, and covered by a platform which bears a thatched hut serv- 
ing to house the sailors and their wares. The craft is propelled by 
graceful crescent-shaped lateen sails of pandanus matting and steered 
by sweeps from the stern. Trading voyages of hundreds of miles are 
often undertaken, the lakatois starting from the east at the waning 
of the southeast trade wind in early November and returning a month 
or two later in the season of the northwest monsoon. 

The Papuan is both ingenious and industrious Avhen working in his 
own interest, and with tactful management he becomes a faithful and 
fairly efficient laborer. Perhaps the most serious defect in the present 
system of employment in Papua is the usually long interval between 
payments. The natives are not paid at intervals of less than one month 
and, often, not until the expiration of their three-year term of service. 
With almost no knowledge of arithmetic and possessed of a fund which 
seems large beyond the dreams of avarice, he is practically certain to be 
cheated by the dishonest tradesmen who flock vulture-like to centers of 
commercial activity. This evil might be in large measure prevented were 
the natives to be paid at monthly intervals, for they would then gradually 



136 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




The Goveenor's Servants, Port Moresby, Goverxmext House Grounds. 



l3ecome accustomed to the handling of money and would gam an appre- 
ciation of its actual value. 

Generations must elapse before more than a moderate degree of 
civilization is developed in Papua^ but the foundations are being surely 
and conservatively laid, and already in the civilized centers natives 
respect and loyally serve their British friends and masters. 

In common with many another British colony, the safeguard of 
Papua lies not in the rifles of the whites, but in the loyal hearts of the 
natives themselves, and in Papua, as in Fiji, the native constabulary 
under the leadership of a mere handful of Europeans may be trusted 
to maintain order in any emergency. As Governor Murray truly states 
in his interesting book " Papua, or British New Guinea," the most val- 
uable asset the colony possesses is not its all but unexplored mineral 
wealth or the potential value of its splendid forests and rich soil, but 
it is the Papuans themselves, and let us add that under the leadership 
of the high-minded, self-sacrificing and well-trained civil servants of 
Great Britain the dawn of Papuan civilization is fast breaking into the 
sunlight of a happiness such as has come to but few of the erstwhile 
savage races of the earth. 



PAPUA, WHERE THE STONE- AGE LINGERS 137 

Without belittling the nobility of purpose or disregarding the self- 
sacrificing devotion of the missionary for his task, let us also grant to 
the civil servant his due share of praise. His duty he also performs in 
the dangerous wilds of the earth ; beset vi^ith insidious disease, stifling in 
unending heat, exiled from home and friends, with suspicious savages 
around him, he labors with waning strength in that struggle against 
climate wherein the ultimate ruin of his body is assured. Yet in his 
heart there lives, growing as years elapse, the English gentleman's ideal 
of service, and for him it is sufficient that, though he is to be invalided 
and forgotten even before he dies, yet his will have been one of those 
rare spirits who have extended to the outer world his mother count' y's 
ideal of justice and fair play. 




Heki " THE Goveenoe's Seevant, Poet Moeesby. 



[Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, pp. 5-26, January, 1916.] 



THE MEK OF THE MID-PACIFIC 

Br ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

MORE than 2,000 years ago, there lived upon the Islands from 
Sumatra to the Philippines an ancient sea-faring race, the 
brown-skinned Sawaiori. Of their origin we know nothing, but that 
they had long been separated from the Indian Peninsula is evident, for 
there are no Sanscrit words in the language of their descendants. 

Much as the Polynesians are to-day, their ancestors, the half-mythical 
Sawaiori, probably were in those ages long past, for even to-day no 
Polynesian population has developed a national solidarity. Their polit- 
ical and social unit is and always has been the village, fortified, self -cen- 
tered, with no communal interest and no civic virtue extending beyond 
the limits of its ramparts of rattan. 

Weak as a house divided against itself were the Sawaiori when before 
the dawn of our Christian era, hordes of Malay pirates began to swarm 
out from southeastern Asia and to overrun the off-lying islands. '- 

We may picture village after village obliterated in an orgie of mas- 
sacre and outrage. From the roar of burning thatch the weak ones slunk 
away, while to the cat-like Malay the heroes fell a prey. One desperate 
resource remained to the joersecuted race— flight over the wide and un- 
known waters of the Pacific. 

Eastward went the fugitives in two great streams, one along the 
northern and the other skirting the southern coast of New Guinea. 

But, although forced by hunger to conquer a landing place, there to 
grow the broad-leaved taro for the onward voyage, no home for the Sawai- 
ori could be found upon New Guinea, for ever in his rear there lurked 
the Malayan prahu, while the forests around him secreted cannibals hun- 
gering for his flesh. Before the dawn of history they sailed, these 
mariners of a weak and exiled race, who heavy with many a fear the 
world has long outlived, yet braved the unknown perils of this loneliest 
of seas — the ocean of the long low heave, the never stilled breathing of 
the monster in his sleep ; for calm over the Pacific has but the semblance 
of peace and over its hours of stillness there broods the threat of storm — 
to them but the inaction of a demon nursing his rage. 

1 For a resume of his own and previous researches upon this subject one 
should consult William Churchill's "Polynesian Wanderings," published by the 
Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1911. 



MEN OF TEE MID-PACIFIC 



139 



Thus onward sped the disheartened bands until New Guinea and the 
Bismarck Archipelago faded beneath the western sea^ and the high 
mountains of the Salomons rose majestically above the eastern horizon. 
Then along the coast of tJiese Islands, so fair to look upon, our wander- 
ers still sailed searching alwaj^s for the land of peace and finding only 
the abode of the Melanesian savage, but still beyond, luring them 011- 
w^ard toward the rising sun, lay the untried ocean. 

Forced at last to leave all land behind, they did as wise sailors 
would have done, steered close into the southeast trades that blow so con- 
stantly over this vast expanse of ocean. Thus wdien starvation hovered 
near, when the last of the meagre store of fermented bread fruit had 
been consumed, and slaves began to fall to sustain the master voyagers, 
there still remained as a last resource the fair wind to boar them back 
to the known but dreaded shores of the Salomons. 

Such a course from the southeasternmost Salomons close hauled on 
the tropical wind, would carry our navigators to the Santa Cruz group 
where once again thev had to encounter theu' old foe the negroid Mela- 



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Natives of Uola, Truk Atoll, Caroline Islands. 



140 



TEE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




KixG A.Nu lIicH Chiefs of Fiji, at Mbau, in 1.SH9. 



nesian. Thus after conquering onl}^ enough of the coveted shore to 
suffice for a temporary resting place, they sped onward and away to dis- 
cover Eotumah where at last peace from all but their own ambitions 
awaited them. 

Then as j^ears passed and little Eotumah became overpopulated, and 
jealousies engendered savage wars, some long-forgotten Columbus of the 
Pacific made a last and final voyage of 600 miles over the open ocean to 
beautiful Samoa, the El Dorado of the Polynesian race. 

With faces toward the rising sun they had gone their fearsome way, 
and as beaten fugitives taking awful chances a remnant of their race 
had found the seclusion of a land untrodden by any but their own feet. 
Yet, as men treasuring the memory of their past, they turned their home- 
sick faces toward the setting sun, whence the spirits of their dead re- 
turned over the ocean to the mythical fatherland the old songs still de- 



MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



141 




Thkee MAIDE^•s OF FUNAFUTI Atoll, Ellice ISLANDS. Types of the I'olyuesian i-ace. 



scribe. For somewhere, far to the westward hiy the half-forgotten 
home, and the something that stands for Europe to ns in America, is 
the fabled Hawaiki to the Polynesians of to-day. 

Generations came and passed, but Samoa remained to them by right 
of eminent domain. Yet history constantly repeats itself, and wars 
and persecutions again operated as of old, so that within historic times, 
from five hundred to three hundred years ago, so the old songs tell, 
great voyages were made from Samoa to Hawaii, to the Cook Islands 
and thence to New Zealand; to Tahiti, Fiji, Tonga, the Ellice and 
Gilbert Islands, and to the remotely isolated Easter Island. In 
Samoa the story is of the departing fugitives and in Hawaii or New 
Zealand the soug tells of their arrival, and the dates of these achieve- 
ments are fixed by the generations of the chiefs that have been and 
passed away, and are now but names known but to the chanting priests. 
For two thousand miles around Samoa the men of Polynesian race were 
masters of the island-world, and thus from Eotumah to Easier Island 
four thousand miles from west to east, and from New Zealand to Hawaii 



142 



THE SCIENTIFIC 21 ON T ELY 



four thousand miles from south to 
north, one general language is 
spoken even to our clay. 

Throughout this vast area, isl- 
ands uninhabited to-day show crude 
carvings on the rocks, as at Pitcairn, 
evidencing the jDresence of voyagers 
long dead. There is reason to be- 
lieve that for centuries before the 
white man came, the arts of canoe- 
making and sailing had been declin- 
ing in Polynesia. Yet centuries 





Man oii 'XKLK Guuli', 1'.,^, j,,i:\i; islamjs. 

Ear-rings made of turtle nnd snail 

shells. Malay admixture is 

apparent. 

before our ancestors dared venture 
from the sight of land, the Polyne- 
sians were lords of the vastest ocean 
empire of the earth. 

Thus far, we have considered 
only the northern current of adven- 
turers, those who sailed along tbe 
northern shore of New Guinea; but 

as Churchill shows, there were others, 

Maafu Maatu, a High Chief of Tonga i r i j. p xi • c 

,.«„hn„, „+• AT / , -Lo.NGA, ^^^^^^ torccd out froiu tiie region of 

Eepuew ot Maafu, who conquered the '^ 

Lau Group of the Fiji Islands. Sumatra, Wandered eastward along 



MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



143 




A WAitiaon OF Tari Taki Islaxd, Gilbert Islands, dressed in cocoanut fiber armor 
and sliarli's skin belt, and holding weapons edged with shark's teeth. 



the southern shore of New Guinea until the}^ reached the region of Torres 
Straits, where traces of their language still remain. Then, as they, too, 
sailed outward over the Pacific, certain of their canoes found a final rest- 
ing place upon the ISTew Hebrides, as at Efate, Aniwa and Fotuna, where 
the negroid Melanesians still retain many Polynesian words and phrases ; 
then, finally, these southern wanderers found Fiji, there to amalgamate 
with the more primitive Melanesians and to give rise to one of the finest 
races now inhabiting the Pacific. 

As for the remnant of Sawaiori words now found in the speech of the 
Malays, it is such as one would expect the sons of conquerers to acquire 
from their mothers of the conquered race. 

The pwest examples of the Polynesian stock to be seen to-day are in 
Samoa, the Society, and Ellice Islands. The once superb men of Kew 
Zealand, and the giant race of Tahiti have degenerated, the popuLition 



144 



THE >[:CIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



of the Marquesas is upon the verge of extinction and the Hawaiians are 
declining and amalgamating with the Chinese. 

In color the Polynesian is a rich bronze-brown, and when not sun- 
burned he ma}^ be said to be about twice as dark as a Spaniard or 
Southern Italian. The black hair, slightly waving, falls in heavy masses 
over the fine broad shoulders. The somewhat flattened never prominent 
nose and chin are very characteristic. The lips are full but not protru- 
sive, and the eyes are almond-shaped, giving so close a general resem- 
blance to the Japanese peasant that one has difficulty in distinguishing 
one from the other when both are mingled in a crowd. The Poljmesian 
is, however, far larger and more muscular in appearance than the Japan- 
ese and as he stands superbly erect, his shoulders never bent under the 
weight of servile burdens or stooped to the student's yolk of mental 
labor, one is forced to liken him to a bronze statue turned to life, so 
charming is the symmetiy of his superb body. In contrast with the 
athletes of our own race, his che?t-mu"cles are far finer, and instead of 




Mother and Daughter, Tarawa Island, Gilbert Islands. 



MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



M5 



being good only in arms or legs his 
uniformity of development is re- 
markable. ISTone of his muscles 
stands out in distorted swollen form, 
but all in all he is the epitome of 
graceful manly strength, not thin 
and cat-like as is the treacherous 
Malay. 

In contrast with the Polynesian 
stands the Papuan of Eastern ISTew 
Guinea for, despite his Polynesian 





Youth of Rogelab Atoll, Mae.shall 
Islands, showing the mode of wear- 
ing -the mat. Micrones'an type. 



\\OMAN SHOWING PlEECED BAES, AND 

Mode of weaeing Mats. Rongelab 
Atoll, Maeshall Islands. 

admixture, in essential character- 
istics he remains negroid, with a 
huge mop-like mass of coarse crin- 
kled hair. His skin is dark choc- 
olate, his arms long, his poorly devel- 
oped legs short and bent at the knees, 
and his body weakly made, his small 
eyes bloodshot and sinister, nose 
large but only moderately flattened, 
and the weak chin and thick pro- 
trusive lips revealing descent from 
Africa. 

In Fiji, and to a lesser degree in 
Tonga we find a mixed race with 



146 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

the mop-like hair and small cruel eye of the Papuan, but with a splen- 
didly developed body, the proud heritage from Polynesian ancestors. 
In Tonga and Fiji the average height is probably quite six feet, and the 
symmetry of form and perfection of development of every muscle in these 
huge but shapely men seem more statuesque than human to us, accus- 
tomed as we are to shoulders bent by the phy-sical and mental tasks of 
civilization. "A Shrimp" the huge Fijian laughingly designates the 
white man, in allusion to his puny strength and ftooping figure. It is a 
new thing to us, this sight of superb bronze-brown men and women, all 
unconscious of their scantiness of clothes, the most beautiful of all 
nature's children in their naturalness. iN'or is it to be r.ssumed that being 
unclothed is conducive to immorality, for the morals of a Fijian village 
would put those of our own towns to the blush. 

In striking contrast to the finer races of the Pacific is the Australian 
who is among the lowest of existing men, apparently comparable in 
culture with the savage who lived in Europe before the Glacial epoch, 
and whose remains have occasionally been found in caverns as at Nean- 
derthal and Spee. The lowest of the Australians are those of the vast 
spinifex deserts of the interior, while the highest in physique and culture 
are found in -the tropical forests of Queensland or along the shores of the 
Northern Territory, where an admixture of Papuan blood has improved 
the race. But nowhere does the Australian rise to the intellectual level 
of the natives of the Pacific Islands. His little eyes glitter suspiciously 
from deeply sunken orbits nearly hidden under unkempt locks of matted 
hair that conceal the low retreating brow, furrowed and frowning. 
The dark chocolate color of his face with its huge flat nose, broad-lipped 
slit-like mouth, projecting teeth, and weak retreating chin form a 
demon-like picture as he skulks silent and snake-like through the 
thickets where he seeks the kangaroo. He wears no clothing, but for 
decoration he may carry a crude necklace of shells or seeds, and his 
body is seamed by the scars of deep cuts attesting to his clan-brand 
and manhood in the tribe, and to his duty done in mourning for lost 
relatives. As one listens to the chattered sounds of these creatures of 
the wilds and observes them feasting gluttonously upon half-cooked 
snakes, insects, or lily pads the thought that man is but the descendant 
of ape-like forms overwhelms one with a horror of conviction as we 
realize that our own ancestors may once have been such as these. 

Only where Papuan influence is apparent does he exhibit any consid- 
erable skill in arts, and even here nearly all his implements are designed 
either for war- or the chase. -He never cultivates the sol, and lives 
crouching under the shelter of miserable domelike huts of bark or leaves. 
The boomerang is his most characteristic weapon, although the spear 
is actually in more universal use in Australia, and it is doubtful whether 
even the boomerang was invented in Australia for it is known to the 



148 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

natives of Ceylon and Timor through which the Australians are supposed 
to have passed on their way from India. 

There are rarely more than fifty persons in a tribe, and they live 
segregated from and suspicious of all others of their race. So restricted 
is intercourse that in Queensland alone there are more than one 
hundred distinct languages. Indeed everything about them points to the 
extreme antiquity of this primitive race whose apparent Indo-Aryan 
affinities appear to ally them more closely to ourselves than to the Pap- 
uans of New Guinea. There is indeed some reason for the conjecture 
that these hideous people of Australia came originally from Hindustan 
where their modern cousins are represented in the tribes of the Dravidian 
coast. 

Women occupy a hopelessly degraded position among the Australians, 
being little more than slaves of their savage captors, who may wound and 
maltreat them in a shocking manner. Yet in all things the Australian 
is better where his contact with civilization has been least, for all that is 
corrupt among us gathers to his ruin and, after a few generations of 
lingering agony, he vanishes a prey to hideous disease. Ear from the 
coast, hidden in the dense forests of tropical Queensland or in the vast 
wilds of the ISTorthern Territory there are still superb specimens of this 
fated race, and even in higher qualities the Australian may not be 
wanting. One must indeed admire the courage of the lone native of the 
desert who with a single spear withstood the coming of the explorer 
Giles and his caravan of camels which must have appeared to him as 
demons from a supernatural realm. 

Courage, an attribute of all mankind, they have yet in common 
with ourselves, and as with all simple people, their deepest fears are 
but the figments of their own imaginations, thus in Papua and else- 
where where the chiefs have but little power, the sorcerer becomes the 
dreaded tyrant of the tribe. Here as elsewhere over the Pacific, the 
whites found the natives shuddering under the espionage of a host of 
evil spirits of their myths, and even to-day when Christianity has in 
great measure supplanted old beliefs, it is the sermon narrating the 
horrors of hell that commands their entranced attention. A deity of 
love is still to them but an unnatural abstraction and a vengeful, 
jealous demon, delighting in his opportunity to punish, is still the 
favorite god of the natives of the Pacific. 

Yet primitive though the Australians are in most respects and unre- 
sponsive to the influences of higher cultures as they have always re- 
mained, the researches of Baldwin-Spencer in the Northern Territory 
show that the natives have been systematically under-rated by previ- 
ous observers, for in their complex and picturesque ceremonial of propi- 
tiation to gods, ghosts and ancestral spirits, as well as in their rigorous 
etiquette and respect for fundamental rights within the tribe, they chal- 



MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



149 



lenge high admiration. A ceremonial deep-rooted in tradition and fixed 
by unchangeable custom controls nearly every act, and tinctures every 
thought of their lives. Even in the minds of the young men this cere- 
monial occupies an important place, but as years go on a greater and 
greater proportion of time is devoted to its observance, so that religious 
rites and dances become practically the sole occupation of the aged. 

The skill of the Australians in tracing barely discernible trails 
through the forest is extraordinary, for they follow at a run the track 
of a horse which passed over the ground five days previously. Their 
3^oung children learn to read with greater rapidity than do those of the 
whites but advancement soon ceases, and arithmetic is a stumbling block 
which they rarely or never overcoine. Indeed, in the wilds they are 
commonly unable to count beyond three or four without objective aid. 

So small are the tribes, and so transient their settlements, that there 
is little communal organization for defense, and thus it is that in Aus- 
tralia the chiefs are held in but little respect, whereas among the Poly- 



V 




Man of Taiu Tari Island, Gilbert Islands. A type of the Micronesian. 



15° 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




Natives of Kuka.nda, Queensland, Austkalia, sLaudiug iu iiuut <ii ilieii lnui^ 
self-inflicted scars denote mourning for dead friends and relatives. 



nesians where the village is a store-house of valued property whose own- 
ers must be both defended and aggressive, the chief gains so high an im- 
portance among conditions incident to a state of feudalism, that he be- 
comes a semi god-like personage across whose shadow none dare pass, 
and who must be addressed in language more primitive and ceremonious 
than that used in conversing with ordinary men. A great body of tra- 
dition transmitted verbally from generation to generation has grown up 
in Polynesia, and the ancestry of the chiefs of the Malietoa family of 
Samoa is traccrl tbu= fnr twerty-five generations, and stories of voyages 
from Samoa, the Co:)k Islands, and Tahiti appear in the songs and myths 



MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



151 




The Pkecipice neae Katoomba in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. 



of :^ew Zealand and Hawaii. The question " What canoe did yonr an- 
cestor come over in" is an important one in Polynesia as well as in 
Massachusetts. Yet in Polynesia, as with ourselves, the treasured tra- 
ditions are those telling of the achievements of ancestors and the great 
deeds of aliens are soon forgotten. Thus, when Cook reached New 
Zealand in 1769 he was surprised to find that the natives retained no 
traditions respecting Tasnian's visit to their shores in 1642. 

As La Parge says it is remarkable that the development of art among 



15 2 . THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

the peoples of the Pacific is by no means commensurate with tlie standard 
of their general culture. It is true that the Australians, who are prob- 
ably the lowest, display no considerable skill in their arts, but the 
Papuans excel the more cultured peoples of Samoa and Tahiti. In 
the Pacific, as with all savages, art constantly manifests a symbolic and 
religious tendency. In Eastern New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, 
the theme of the decoration is the representation of the head of the wor- 
shipped frigate bird, while in the Cook Islands the elaborately carved 
paddles were covered with the conventionalized figures of tribal heroes. 
Almost if not every design, could we discover its history, would be found 
to be a picture-prayer to a demon, ghost, or ancestral spirit of the tribe. 
Art's chief concern is to placate spirits powerful for good or evil. Yet 
human nature in far Polynesia is not different from its co-type in Paris, 
and in every savage tribe those who love form and color, love it for its 
own sake and, like Whistler, feel that art is and needs no mission to 
justify its being. 

It is always the spirit of the man who has been murdered that the 
South Sea Islander dreads, and should a tree fall, all within hearing flee 
to avoid the sight of the disemboweled ghost of the victim of some half 
forgotten feast. The very breeze among the palm trees whispers tales of 
a horrible past. 

Everywhere over the Pacific Islands, be the inhabitants of what race 
they may, there are certain fundamental things in which they are alike. 
The house is but a single room, and among the cruder, tribes it serves 
not only as a shelter for the family, but also for the housing of pigs and 
chickens. Property in Polynesia is possessed by the family or the com- 
munity rather than by the individual, and under certain conditions if a 
member of the tribe steals from his neighbor and succeeds in secreting his 
possession for several days he acquires a personal right to that which he 
covets, and may then appear acknoAvledged by all as its owner by right 
of strategy. The system of barter is usually direct without the inter- 
vention of any sort of currency, and presents in our sense are unlniown 
in the Pacific. Your intended gift will be received as proffered barter, 
and returned at once if it be undesired. Thus it is that white-handled 
knives could not be disposed of even as " gifts " in Fiji, while black were 
readily accepted, and conspicuously patterned red and white waist-clothes 
must be presented in Tahiti, but dark blue ones, are in vogue in Fiji. 

Everywhere one finds traces of the customs of cannibal days revealed 
at times in acts the significance of which is now unthought of. Thus 
in Samoa the village reprobate is wrapped in leaves and carried through 
the town, and then placed upon the cold stones of an oven, the fire in 
these days remaining unlighted. In Fiji, the deepest insult is to refer 
to a man as the " son of a roasted father." 

Among uncultured peoples the rulers aided by the priests soon invent 



MEN OF TEE MID-PACIFIC 



153 




EUCALYPTIS TeEES AKD SANDSTONE PeECIPICES NEAR WeNTWOETH FaLLS IN THE BLUE 

Mountains of New South Wales. 



means to relegate to themselves privileges which once were shared among 
the many, and matters thus restricted to the few finary become shielded 
from the masses by religions screens which take the form of tabus. Thus 
over the Pacific, cannibalism which once simply satisfied the appetite, 
of the starving, became religious in its significance and restricted to the 
aristocracy, among whom it was supposed to transmit to the victor the 
virtues of the vanquished; to this end being practised by the North 
American Indian as well as by the Pacific Islander. 



154 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

Man must measure all things in terms of liis own experience, and to 
the Pacific Islander we ourselves are imagined to live in small com- 
munities upon distant islands. We are supposed to laiow personally all 
other white men and many an unfortunate mariner has been held re- 
sponsible for the evil acts of those of other ships — his friends and 
tribesmen from the native's point of view. Thus it was that, in 1839, 
Williams the great missionary was murdered in the New Hebrides in 
revenge for outrages committed upon the natives by previous visitors, 
and the philanthropic Commodore Groodenough met death at Santa Cruz 
from a similar cause in 1875. 

All sorts of miracles are expected from the white man, and it is only 
rarely that a native evinces any surprise at our acts. The working of 
great steam engines, the phonograph, photography and the electric light 
are taken as matters of course even though seen for the first time. I 
have, however, seen a Polynesian chief too greatly alarmed to wait for his 
beverage when uj^oi^ pressing a button an electric bell jingled in the 
adjacent room; another leaped overboard in a paroxysm of fear when 
given a cake of ice, while in another instance the uncanny event of 
the visit was the glowing of an electric light immersed beneath the sea. 
Wilkes found that the Fijians were far more afraid of his rockets 
("fiery spirits") than of his guns or cannon. Miracles to be received 
as such must fall within the field of our partial comprehension, the 
wholly inexplicable is neither miraeulnus nor interesting. A Fijian 




Looking dowx the Valley fkoji Govett's Leap in the Blue Mountains of New 

South Wales. 



MEN OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



155 




A Teee Fekn- in the Primeval Woods of Quee.nsi.axu. 

taken to Sydney gazed stolidly upon the great buildings with no ex- 
pression of" surprise, but was deeply stirred upon seeing a two-wheeled 
push-cart laden heavily with bananas. 

A custom which is probably of Polynesian origin, but has spread 
universally over the Pacific, is that of the tabu which was a consequence 
of the communistic ownership of property. The ceremony of the tabu 
is pronounced by the high chief, and thereafter none may molest the 
protected place or thing. Thus the cocoa-nut palms are made tabu 
while the fruit is maturing. There are, however, many forms of per- 
sonal tabu which merge into witch-charms and threats of evil, for 
belief in witches is universal over the Pacific. 

In the South Sea Islands women are considered to be the property 
of men and the ceremony of marriage where it exists shows its kinship 
with that of the tabu. Struggles for the possession of women are almost 
the sole cause of native warfare, and everywhere woman is the servant 
rather than the companion of man, although in some places her domestic 



156 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



duties may be the reverse of our conception, as in Truk in the Carolines 
where the woman goes out upon the sea to fish, while the husband re- 
mains at home to care for house and children. The " house " is how- 
ever only a combination of chicken-roost and pig pen. It is due to the 
looseness of the marriage tie and not to respect for women that name 
and rank descend throvigh the maternal side, the mother alone being 
ascertainable with certainty. 

A pleasing element in the life of the Polynesians is their system of 
entertaining strangers. The largest edifice in the village is set aside for 
this purpose and is called the " strangers' house," and upon the coming 
of guests it resounds far into the night with the sound of song and dance. 
When the copra is to be gathered, or the taro matures in the swamps, 
or the yams have grown big upon the mountain sides then one hears the 
songs of many a canoe bearing youthful visitors gaily decked in garlands, 
and singing to the rhj^thmic splash of paddles as they glide along the 




Natives of Ponapi, Caroline Islands. 



MEN OF TEE MID-PACIFIC 



157 




House at Eda Island, Tonga. 



shore. The entertaining village is then full of merriment until the labor 
of the harvest is over when the chief apportions all among the families, 
of his village and their guests. For socialism is the dominant spirit of 
life in Polynesia. 

The chief holds property only in the name of his tribe, the individual 
hardly exists as a personal owner of earthly things, and intelligent natives 
have declaimed to me against " the money of the white man " saying that 
" it was the cause of all our selfishness." When I spoke of our paupers 
to a head chief of Fiji he asked in surprise how could this be for " surely 
their friends would feed them were they hungry." In Fiji years ago, so 
the story goes, an ambitious young native became a clerk to a grocer m 
Suva, and so good a salesman was he that his English master sent him 
back to his native village with a goodly supply of grocer's stores. 
Whereat old friends and neighbors came to partake of these things 
but were told that all were to be sold as did " the white man in Suva." 
In a storm of rage the contents of the budding grocer's shop were divided 
among all in the village, and the "meanest man in" Fiji" returned to 
" the white man's town." 

In Polynesia an era of dark portent dates from the white man's com- 
ing, for long ago they were content in the thought that the village 
had always been there since the sea-god Hiro had piloted their ancestral 
canoe to the Island from that other Island of Hawaiki far to the west- 
ward in the region of Pulotu where the dead go home in the evening. 
Through all the ages since those long gone days the thatched houses 



158 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



had clustered under the shadows of the cocoa palms, and rustling leaves 
and murmuring surf had lulled the village in its sleep. As it always had 
been so it was, and so men felt it would endure as did the long blue line 
whereon the ocean met the sky. Unchanged it always would be so the old 
dreamer Maui sang until a canoe would come that would float upright 
without an outrigger ; an impossibility as all men knew. 

But one day it came, that God's canoe without an outrigger. Cloud- 
like it shaped itself and grew ever more ominous and vast until its huge 
sails towered above the palm trees, and it came to rest. It was the 
canoe of the Papalangi, they " who came from beyond the sky." Then 
pale-faced ghosts — " the sailing gods " — came upon the island, and the 
new era commenced for the little village. 

A long sad era that endures to-day, darkened by the horrors of strange 
disease and death, humiliated by the domination of avaricious and un- 
sympathetic masters who peonized the bodies and despised the traditions 
of the people of the little village so that to-day it lingers silent and with- 
ering, where once its songs of merriment were heard. 

May we from our cultural heights descend to cheer with kindly sym- 
pathy these children of the Island World ? Is there aught in our civiliza- 
tion that can serve to instil into their minds new hope, to reestablish 
industry, and renew ambition? The task is difficult indeed, for the 
weak have always been the victims of the strong, be they civilized or 
savage. 

The very possession of skill in arts and trades has penalized the 




Canoe at Vavau, Tonga. 



MEN OF TEE MID-PACIFIC 159 

natives and subjected them to the persecution of the bigoted and the 
avaricious. 

Fair play is sadly needed — indeed the thing most needed — in the 
Pacific of to-day. Only through governmental action can adequate 
craft-schools be maintained and markets found and developed for the 
products of native manufacture. 

It is a sad reflection upon our civilization that, through wanton 
neglect, the world has lost the art of the famous wood carvers of New 
Zealand, the mat and fan makers of the Marshall Islands, and the tapa 
decorators of Hawaii, Samoa, and Fiji. Yet under sympathetic guid- 
ance these crafts might have been modified to conform to the demands 
of world wide markets and the carved furniture of New Zealand, the 
artistic floor matting of the Marshall Islanders, and the attractive wall 
papers of the Hawaiians might have been the j^rized possession of many 
an American and European home. 

Grant them but a just profit for their labor and the races that now are 
dying of apathy would suddenly awaken into ambitious, self-respecting 
men and women. 



[Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 125-148, 

February, 1916. 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 

By Dr. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

THE map of the mid-Pacific shows about eight hundred small islands 
dotting the expanse of the tropical sea. So prominent do these 
appear upon the chart with their names stretching over hundreds of 
miles that the voyager is surprised to find that they are in reality all 
but lost upon the vast area of the waters. Thus it was that in 1521 
Magellan sailed 8^000 miles across the ocean and saw only four small un- 
inhabited islets until he came upon the Ladrones in the far eastern 
Pacific. 

During the century that elapsed after Magellan's voyage, only two 
important mid-Pacific groups^, the Marquesas and the Paumotos, were 
discovered, for the explorers made the best speed they could with the 
southeast trade wind from the coast of South America, and such a course 
even from Cape Horn carries one to the northward of the great archipela- 
goes which lie in the tropical regions of the southern hemisphere. 

Yet in the Pacific even in these days of steam, there stretches for 
days and weeks around one only the monotony of sea and sky, and it is 
with the delight of surprise that the far mountain peak is seen looming 
cloud-like through the haze, or, if the island be an atoll, a ragged row 
of cocoanut palms thrusts suddenly above the long line of the horizon. 

Apart from such large land masses as New Caledonia and New 
Zealand, which contain continental rocks, the islands of the mid-tropical 
Pacific are either volcanoes, or elevated limestone reefs, or low-lying 
atolls which are believed to rest upon the submerged peaks of extinct 
volcanoes. 

Sir John Murray tells us that the area of the Pacific is about 69,000,- 
000 square miles, 65 per cent, of which is between 13,000 and 18,000 feet 
in depth. Indeed, the floor of the ocean between the Galapagos and the 
Paumotos is a plain in comparison with which the wide levels of Eussia 
and of our Middle States are diversity itself. This vast flat bottom 
of the eastern Pacific is the widest area of deep water upon earth. Asia, 
Africa, and North and South America might all be sunken beneath it 
and not overlap. Indeed, one might sail nearly 8,000 miles south- 
eastward from Behring Strait to the Antarctic, and for 7,000 miles of 
the course the least depth would be 12,000 feet, and at no place would 
the bottom be within a mile of the surface. The continental shores rise 
abruptly from this deep, floor, and in a few places we find trough- 

i6o 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC i6i 




1 62 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

like or pit-like clej)ressions sunken far iDelow the bed of the sea, or an 
isolated volcanic cone rises dome-like from the j^lain, but the diversified 
landscape of hill and valley has no counterpart in the hidden world be- 
neath the sea. 

The deepest regions of the oceans are commonly close to the shore 
and are believed to have been caused by the crumpling inward of the 
earth^s crust due to the pressure of the near land. Such is the " Tusca- 
rora Deep," a long narrow trough which extends northward from Japan 
along the coast of Asia; its bottom being more than 27,600 feet below 
the surface of the sea and 12,600 feet below the general level of the 
ocean's floor. An even more profound ab3'SS is the Aldrich Deep close 
to the Tongan and Kermadec Islands which sinks to a depth of 30,930 
feet. The greatest yet found, however, is the Swire Deep off Mindanao 
of the Philippines, this being 32,089 feet or 3,089 feet deeper than 
Mount Everest of the Himalayas is high. 

However, one gains an idea of the rarity of such abyssal regions 
from the fact that of the 9,750 soundings that have been made and 
reported in water over 1,000 fathoms in depth, only 17 were greater 
than 4,000 and only 3 exceeded 5,000 fathoms in depth. The greatest 
recorded depth of the ocean is only 409 feet more than six miles. 

By contrast with these troughs and pits, submerged plateaus rise 
gently above the general level of the ocean floor, and here and there and 
at rare intervals a mountain obtrudes above the submarine plain. All 
these isolated mountains are volcanoes and thus every truly oceanic 
island is but the summit of a pyramid thrown upward until its corrod- 
ing peak may rise 13,800 feet above the sea ,as does Mauna Kea in Hawaii, 
or if now submerged, it may be capped by a thickness of several hundred 
feet of limestone and coral as in Bermuda. 

The fairest islands in all the tropic world are those of Marquesas 
and Tahiti, where jagged sheets of basalt tower in grotesquely sculp- 
tured precipices thousands of feet above the soft lavas and tufas that 
the rains have washed away. Long ago these islands were volcanoes of 
an explosive type such as -<3Etna of to-day, and molten basalt Avelled 
upward from the depths and filled the gaping rents in the pyramids of 
softer ash and lava. Then, after the fires had died, the tropical rains 
began their slow persistent work so that to-day deep valleys wind sinu- 
ously downward from the summits to the sea, and the sound of rushing 
brooks is forever upon the ear. Green as corroding malachite set in the 
azure of the sea, the splendid peaks and shaded gorges lie mantled in the 
soft mist-loving verdure of the tropics, where the banana, orange, bread- 
fruit, mango, kavika, alligator pear, and Tahitian chestnut grow in wild 
profusion. 

The surf in these tropical regions is far less destructive than .along 
our own frost-ravaged shores, for this is the domain of coral reefs, and 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 




Tae-o-hae Valley, Mukuhiva Islam., MAiiyuEsAs. 



many a crumbling volcanic cone lies protected within an encircling break 
water upon which the wave is smothered into foam, leaving only ripples 
to reach the palm-fringed shore. 

Sheltered thus from the wear of the sea, lies the slumbering volcano 
whose fires have been dead for many a thousand years. At night, the 
cool air of its mountain heights wafts downward to the sea, fragrant with 
jessmine and spice, and all the subtle perfume of a tropic wild. By 
day the sea-breeze assumes the mastery, and awakens the snowy flash of 
breakers where the rollers die into wavelets a mile or more from shore. 
This silvery line of surf marks the position of the barrier reef which 
encircles the island, leaving a calm and shallow channel between the 
reef-rim and the shore. Here protected the native plies his frail 
canoe, knowing as he does all the haunts of the fish among the coral 
clusters which here and there rise abruptly from the depths to the 
surface ; and on calm days we may wade along the outer edge over many 
a place where a single seaward step would plunge one into water a 
hundred feet in depth. 

Rich coral reefs usually occur in inaccessible places and are so studi- 
ously shunned by commercial vessels that the ordinary traveler has but 
little opportunity of seeing them at close range. The living corals rise 
in clusters above the volcanic rock or limestone upon which they have 
acquired an anchorage. They are, as is well known, animals closely 



1 64 TEE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

related to sea-anemones, and their young when as small as a pin's head, 
are cast out into the water as little pear-shajDed larvse covered with vibra- 
ting cilia. After being drifted by currents and swimming feebly for a few 
days, the little creature settles down upon the bottom and soon grows 
into a minute sea-anemone-like animal whose skin secretes lime and thus 
forms a skeleton, and it is this stony support, after the animal itself has 
died, that we commonly call " coral." After it has become attached to 
the bottom, the little polyp acquires tentacles which surround the 
mouth and then it begins to grow either into a simple form, or by bud- 
ding to assume a shape in accordance with the habit of its species. At 
first but a single polyp it buds or divides so that there may be thousands 
of such with their stomachs more or less connected. Thus the animal 
is a colonial one, and when one polyp captures a minute crustacean, the 
other polyps in its neighborhood share in the benefit. Doctor T. Way- 
land Vaughan, who has studied them most carefully, tells us that corals 
are voracious creatures and feed upon almost any small floating animal 
they can capture, but plants they will have none of for they are strictly 
carnivorous. 

Olive and yellow-greens, mauve and purple-browns are the colors of 
the living corals. Glinting they lie in the limpid water with the glis- 
tening white of limestone sands around them. Here and there accentu- 
ating the color of the scene is a deep blue starfish (LincMa), or a flower- 
like sea-anemone a foot or more in width beautifying a crevice with 
tracery rivaling old Venetian glass, while closely wedged within its 




CA.XoKS A,\U W.'.Ki;;ilU UF L'oI.A Isl V^D, '1 la K (,UnLl', CAUnLINK ISI.AM 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



165 




1 66 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

special cavern lies the giant clam (Tridacna), the sinuous cleft between 
its valves, a zigzag of malachite and blue, green or mottled brown. 
Among the corals, one finds delicate forests of fused branches rich purple- 
brown with pink and snowy tips {Acropora) , or green-olive and yellow- 
green nodular forms such as Porites, Orlicella, or Goniastrea. Some of 
the species of Porites upon the Great Barrier Eeef of Australia are 
twenty or more feet in diameter and must surely have been .a century in 
growing, for it is known that in Torres Straits under favorable conditions 
they may enlarge in diameter at the rate of nearly two inches per annum. 

Silt and drifted mud are fatal to corals, for they stifle the feeding 
polyps and the dead surface is soon honeycombed by a host of worms and 
weeds and moUusks, so that the base of each old coral-head is cavernated 
with intricate retreats which form the home of the reef fish — those living 
jewels of the tropical sea, rivalling the butterflies in color. 

Opposite the mouth of every mountain stream, we find an opening 
in the wall of the encircling reef ; for the outflow of brackish water and 
silt prevent the growth of corals in such places and thus a harbor is 
formed. Here nestled under the shadows of palm trees close to the pro- 
tected shore lie the thatched houses of the natives, resembling haystacks 
as one sees them from afar. 

Drawn up in an irregular line, for all is hap-hazard in the South Seas, 
lie the canoes of the village, carved in strange symbolism to propitiate 
gods and tribal heroes. Each has its slender outrigger ingeniously 
constructed, ,a marvel of flexibility and strength, and its sail woven of 
pandanus leaves is carefully covered under a matting to protect it fmm 
the molding due to damp. In sailing, the outrigger is always on the 



-<^^. 



Mode of Tacking ax Outkiggek Canoe. 

windward side, and the sail itself is never reefed, but instead one, two 
or. three men place themselves upon the outrigger. Breezes are known 
therefore as "one," "two," or "three-man winds." A high degree of 
skill is required in sailing these canoes, for the outrigger must skim 
lightly through the water. Should it rise into the air, the canoe over- 
turns, and if it sinks, a sudden lufl capsizes the navigators; not, how- 
ever, a serious accident where all are swimmers from earliest childhood. 
As the outrigger must always remain upon the weather side the method 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



167 




House at Pua Island, Tonga, showing a wooden drum and drumstick in the fore- 
ground. 

of tacking is curious, for instead of luffing up into the wind, they put the 
helm up and hold the canoe off until the wind is abaft. Then the 
"tack" or lower point of the lateen sail is carried aft and tied down; 




Tke Council House of L'onuafali, Funafuti Atoll, Kllice Islands. 



i68 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



and the canoe starts backward, that which was the stern now becoming 
the bow. 

Such is the life of man ujDon the " high islands " of the tropical 
Pacific, and as for the islands themselves, the fascination of their isola- 
tion is the keynote of their charm, set as they are in the amethystine blue 
of the coral sea that flashes into emerald over shallows near the shore. 
Forests rich with fruit, and many a stream and coral reef afford sus- 
tenance in abundance to the natives of these favoured regions of the 
tropical Pacific. 

But there is another, much commoner, and wholly different type of 
island — the atoll. The popular idea that atolls are circular or regularly 




A House of Funafuti, Ellicb Islands. 



elliptical in outline is false, for they commonly consist of a strai'gling 
line of long, low islets enclosing with many breaks an irregularly-shaped 
basin, or lagoon, the bottom of which is quite level and about one hun- 
dred feet in depth, although often many miles in width. Another er- 
roneous impression is that the islets are composed mainly of coral. 
Broken fragments of corals are cast upon their shores, it is true, and 
may form an irregular wall twelve or more feet in height along the 
seaward beach, but usually the bulk of the material forming the islets 
is composed of fragments of shells, calcareous plants, and other organic 
limestones which after being churned and pounded in the surf are finally 
tossed up by wave and wind, above the reach of the sea. 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



] 6g 





The Pish-tailed Canoe of Funafuti Atoll, Ellice Islands. 

Darwin thought that atolls owed their formation to subsidence. 
He imagined a coral reef encircling a volcanic cone. Then should the 
volcano slowly sink beneath the sea, the ring of coral would as con- 
stantly grow upward until finally the central mountain would disappear 
leaving only the ring of the coral reef. Simple as this hypothesis 
appears upon paper, it does not accord with the observed facts, for it 
fails to explain the remarkable flatness of the bottom of the lagoon 
with its prevalant uniform depth of 20 fathoms. 

The general seaward slope of the atoll is nearly 45°, so that one 
commonly finds a depth of three quarters of a mile within a mile from 







shore. Only the upper part of this slope is, however, covered with liv- 
ing reef-corals and these form a mere veneer between depths of 120 
feet and the surface. Indeed, the upper rim of the reef is apt to project 
as_a low ridge several inches above high tide. This ridge is dull red 
in color, and consists in a dense growth of stony sea-weed, Lithotham- 
mion, and nullipore. 



170 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



Between the nullipore ridge and the shore there is a submerged 
platform over which the breakers drive so fiercely during storms that 
few corals can cling within its scanty crevices. This platform is usually 
from one hundred to six hundred feet wide and its floor is commonly not 
more than three feet in depth at low tide. The seaward beach of the 
island is a chaotic mass of dead and broken coral-heads which have 
been torn from the outer reef and driven inward over the platform to 
be cast high above the wash of ordinary waves. On the lagoon side, 
also, we sometimes find the same conditions repeated upon a miniature 
scale; the slope, the platform, and the wave-raised coral-heads being 
similar to the corresj)onding formations of the seaward side of the islet, 
but the nullipore rim is commonly absent from the lagoon side for these 
limestone-making j^lants thrive only in heavy breakers. 

In the center between the seaward and lagoon-ward ridges, one finds 
the lowest part of the islet, this region often being below sea level, anfl 
forming a brackish swamp, whose noxious waters constitute the only 
drinking supply of the atoll. \ 

Brain corals and other huge, massive forms grow close to the 
seaward edge of the reef, where the surges dash over and among 
them, but the forests of fragile stag-horns (Acropora) thrive best 
in more protected places. Others of the genus Fungia are attached, 
only in early life, by a slender stalk which soon breaks, and they then 
lie loosely upon the reef like petrified mushrooms pushed about at the 




A Caxoe urox the Lagoon Beach of Funafuti Atoll, Ellice Islands. 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-TACIFIC 




A Uelle of I'uNAFuii, Ellice Islands. 



caprice of the Avaves. Others (Siclerastrea) , called "rolling stone 
corals/' may break loose and be rolled about, the upper side always re- 
generating and growing so that the mass becomes egg-shaped or spher- 
ical. In general, however, as has been shown by Vaughan and others, 
the small branching and slender forms must grow either at considerable 
depths or in protected places to Avithstand the rough treatment of the 
sea, thus the deep parts of the seaward precipices of the coral reef are 
covered with fragile corals, Oculina, and Eusmilia, and the leaf-like 



172 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

Turljinarici and Agaricea secure in their quiet depths beneath the agi- 
tation of the storm. 

Eeef corals do not commonly grow, however, at depths greater than 
100 feet, and indeed the most flourishing are in water less than six feet 
deep, and some are even laid bare at the lowest tides. In times of hurri- 
canes vast masses of broken coral are caught in the rush of the waters 
and tossed far up upon the outer edges of the reef flats, and rocks 
weighing tons may thus be lifted fully fifteen feet above the level of 
the sea. In this manner the originally submerged rim of the reef has in 
some places gradually been raised, new corals growing upon the shat- 
tered fragments of the old, but we must always remember that the slow 
persistent effects of everyday conditions have far more to do with shap- 
ing atolls than have hurricanes. 

In coral reef regions, the bottom of the sea is often found to be cov- 
ered with fine white limestone mud. This becomes converted into rock 
and may form plateaus thousands of square miles in area and hundreds 
of feet thick as in the Bahamas and in Florida. This chalky deposit 
was formerly called "coral mud," but recently, Drew and Kellerman 
have shown that it has no relation to corals, for according to these 
authors the warm surface waters of the tropical ocean are infested with 
bacilli which set up a complicated chemical reaction that enables the 
calcium to combine with the dissolved carbon dioxide and to form a 
chalky precipitate, the myriad little granules of which may possibly 
cause the wonderful blue color of the tropical sea. In any event, in the 
Atlantic this precipitate sinks to the bottom and there forms into oolite 
in the manner described by Linck and by Vaughan. 

It may be of interest to observe that the relative paucity of nitrogen 
in the waters of the tropics may account for the few seaweeds found 
in warm regions, for nowhere in the tropics are there anything like 
the kelps and fucus that cover the rocks of the north Atlantic shores 
of Europe .and America. Also the scarcity of plant life in the trop- 
ical ocean is correlated with the comparative absence of the swarms 
of floating marine animals such as are so characteristic of Arctic seas, 
for in cold seas individuals are abundant, but species are few, whereas 
in the tropics there are many species, but most of them are rare. 

In the tropics, where frost is unknown, the moist shell-sand of the 
beaches is dissolved by rain water and then precipitated, the fragments 
becoming cemented into a solid rock-mass, this action being especially 
noticeable between tidal levels, but by no means confined to such places, 
for in the Bahamas hills several hundred feet high have been formed 
in this manner out of wind-blown shell-dust and limestone particles. 
Indeed, rain water charged with carbonic acid derived from the de- 
composition of vegetation dissolves limestone and thus each little grain 
of shell-sand is partially dissolved, and then, if the water evaporates or 



THE ISLANDS OF TEE MID-PACIFIC 



173 












f-^-^^wTO 










' '- ''**ff»^^^ 




\ 




i 


f *' ^ ^wp''^ 










l.lf ■ 




- 


:-<*& 






sfc-a.- 






. -.as i-iRTi.*. 


«*- - s«*- -■™'«™ " ^ " -' ^ «»sr - '<st/^'^ 



^ 



CAXOIO DitAW.N 1 !• Ui'U-N 11. K DEACH AT UOXGELAK ATOI.I., MAKSKALL ISLANDS. 

The sail is covtrert with a thatch of pandanus leaves to protect it fi-om rain. The 
little deck-house on the outrigger is for storing food when voyaging. 



the limestone be precipitated, the grains become cemented one to an- 
other by little bridges of calcinm carbonate, and thns a Coquina is 
formed, such as one may see at St. Augustine in Florida, and on most 
of the atoll islands of the world. 

Currents, waves, and winds have much to do with the building up 
of the islets of the atolls. The waves press constantly over the rim, 
and the basin of the lagoon is filled to overflowing, so that most of the 
water thus driven into it must escape on the leeward side. Accord- 
ingly, the deepest openings are always so placed that we must beat up 
into the wind in attempting to enter the lagoon. Practically every 
deep entrance into a Pacific lagoon is partially blocked on the inner 
side by an islet which has formed in the vortex from materials drawn 
together by the outrushing Avater. 



174 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 



Even when the tide is high, there is apt to be an outflow of water 
through all openings on the leeward side of the atoll, but at low tide 
the whirlpools and breakers in such j)laces are often fearful to behold. 

In opposition to Darwin's theory, an hypothesis, prominently pre- 
sented by Professor Eeginald A. Daly, is gaining ground. This states 
that the great polar ice-caps of the glacial period must have been 
formed from water taken up from the ocean by evaporation to con- 
stitute the snows of the polar regions. Thus the level of the trop- 
ical oceans of those days may have become about 120 feet lower 
than at present. ISTow, if this were the case, the sea would wash away 
the shores, forming platforms at sea level for the corals being mainly 
killed by the low temperature could not protect the Island from the 
waves. Then, when the ice-caps melted and the ocean rose and again 
grew warm the corals growing upon the outer edges of these platforms 
formed the present atolls and barrier reefs. If this be true, all the 
modern coral reefs are upon platforms which the corals themselves did 
not l)uild up, but around the outer edges of Avhich they form rim-like 
sea-walls. In confirmation of this, Andrews has shown that the jDlatform 
upon the seaward edge of Avhich the barrier reefs of Australia have grown, 
extends southward beyond the latitude of coral growth. We may ol^serve 
that it also extends northward to New Guinea, beyond the region where 
the corals are killed by the silt from the Fly Eiver. Dr. Vaughan has 




Sea-going War-canoe of Uola Island, Tkuk Group, Caroline Islands. 

feet long. 



Canoe 25 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



175 




Primeval Foeest of Queensland, neae Kueanda. 



also demonstrated that the platform upon which the Florida reef has 
grown extends northward from Fowey Eocks into a region too cold for 
corals, and he shows that this relation appears to be general among coral 
reefs. 

As one approaches the atoll presents a charming picture. At first 
only a line of clustered palms seemingly arising out of the ocean itself. 
Then the white glint of sandy beach and, finally, we sail through a 
narrow opening and find ourselves securely anchored in the limpid 
waters of the calm lagoon surrounded by .a narrow broken ring of islets. 



176 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




Baekon Falls, Queensland, Australia, in the Dry Season. These falls are about 

700 feet high. 



Glistening and brilliant it lies with the sunlit sea around it, a 
shimmer of turquoise and emerald set in the everlasting blue of the 
Pacific where the flash of flying spray gives action to the scene. With 
its palm groves muiniuring to the Ijreezc, its alaliaster Ijeaeh, and l)y con- 
trast the soft colors of withered thatch where palm-leaf houses nestle 
beneath the shade along the lagoon's shore. All splendid and si^ark- 
ling, none can resist the invitation of its charm. 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



177 




COCOANUTS AND OLD VOLCANOES OF RARATONGA, CoOK ISLANDS. 



But once on lancl^ one is doomed to disappointment. The natives 
are starved and sickly in comparison with their more favored cousins 
of the high islands. The scintillating heat of the blistering sands, 
the sparse and thorny plants of less than fifty kinds, redeemed only by 
the cocoanut and the pandanus, without which man must starve or die 
of thirst — all illusions vanish in the stifle of the barren, glaring, thorny 
place and we long for the ship's cool deck and the awning's gracious 
shade. Life is poor and dull upon these atolls, rarely more than an 
eighth of a mile wide, with neither hills nor valleys, without streams 
or springs, and with the heavy murmur of breakers forever in one's ears. 

Pure drinking water is the most prized luxury of the atoll. To 
obtain it, the natives cut furrows extending diagonally down the stems 
of cocoanut palms and leading into a cavity cut in the trunk of the tree. 



178 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

within which a few ounces may collect. Failing of this meagre supply, 
they resort in time of drought to the mosquito haunted swamps which 
occur here and there in the center of the islet. 

Thus it is that the natives of the atolls are less cultured, less inter- 
esting and poorer both in material and intellectual things than are 
their relatives upon the high volcanic islands. 

An intermediate geological condition is seen in another type of 
island which the non-geological traveler is apt to confuse with the vol- 
canic, but which is actually only an elevated atoll or coral reef. In vol- 
canic regions, considerable local oscillations of level are common and 
it is known that between the fifth and the twelfth centuries long 
stretches of the shore of the Bay of Naples sank forty feet beneath the 
sea and then rose 20 feet above its lowest level. In the Pacific greater 
oscillations have occurred, for some of the coral reefs of the Fijis are 
now more than eight hundred feet above the ocean, and other examples 
of elevated atolls or coral reefs are found in Nine, Eua and Yavau in 
Tonga, and in Makatea of the Paumotos islands. 

In these elevated coral islands, bold precipices of dull gray lime- 
stone frown gloomily upon the sea, their hostile walls stained here and 
there a rusty red where coral heads have decomposed, leaving the ruddy 
stain of iron. Caverns with stalactytes drooping like curtains from 
their roofs are found along the steep face of the cliif, and within them 
the chiefs of other days lie buried. In places the sea gains access to 
these caverns, and in the darkened pools live some of the creatures 
whose true home is upon the dimly-lighted bottom of the sea, 1,000 
feet below the surface. Yet here in the everlasting shade flower-like 
crinoids crawl slowly over the rocks, and long, lythe sea-whips {Alcy- 
onaria) coil and uncoil in the dying surge that wanders to their far 
retreats. 

The torrential rains of the tropics have for ages been beating down 
upon these elevated coral islands so that the whole surface is a riot of 
jagged projections. If flames were by .a magician's wand suddenly 
turned to rock, they would not be more grotesque or flaring than these 
knife-edged masses which everywhere project over the surface of an 
elevated coral island. Here and there and everywhere the mouths of 
treacherous caverns yawn to entrap the traveler. So clinker-like is this 
barren rock which rings with a metallic sound when struck, that the 
non-geologist at once concludes that the island is volcanic, and only 
the sight of corals heads imbedded here and there in the scoriaceous- 
looking mass will convince him that he is treading upon an elevated 
reef. One's boots are torn to shreds, yet the bare-footed natives leap 
from crag to crag uninjured; a marvellous example of the superiority 
of natural shoe-leather. 

The soil of these islands collects in the numerous crevices, and here 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 



179 



the banana grows in the dark-red ferriiginous earth that gathers in 
the bottom of many a pit. Thus the older these islands, the deeper 
does their soil become, so that at Kamuka, A^avau, or Ena in Tonga, or 
in Nine, we find the surface covered with a rich rusty soil which sup- 
ports a vegetation almost as varied as that of the volcanic islands. 

Only half conscious of the present, wantonly forgetful of the past 




The BASA1.TIC Peak of Boea Boka, Society Islands, showing the trade wind .n the 

palm trees. 

and heedless of the future, life in the south seas passes as a day-dream, 
a reverie aimless as the airs that trifle among the palm leaves only to 
lapse into the nothingness of things that were. Yet nature in the 
tropics is a trixy jade, and at times drops her seductive, soothing ways 
and rushes headlong into tragedy. All other memories may lapse into 
forgetfulness, but the day and year of the hurricane is recalled, and 
the story of it passes into myth and is handed down from generation 
to generation. 



l«o 



THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 




Native Huts at Jaluit, Maeshall Islands. 

Hurricanes come in the autumn; in that season when tlie long, hot 
calms of the tropical summer are about to break into the steady 
trade winds of the winter months. Thus in SejDtemher and October 
in the West Indies, and in February and March in the South Pacific, 




C'A.NUK Laue.n wrni Maticuiai.s for Constructing a House, Fiji Islands. 



THE I LANDS OF TEE MID-PACIFIC 



I8l 




Saceed Bats of Hihifa Village, To>;gatai;u. 

the heated air rising above the sea is believed to set up an inrush from, 
all sides and a great whirlwind gathers, aided probably by the close 
proximity of the developing trade winds, and by the rotation of the 




COCOANUT I'ALMS. 



Lagoon Beach of Fakarava Atoll, Padmotos. 
Stevenson lived within this grove. 



Robert Lculs 



1 82 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

earth, for the swirl is always contra-clockwise in the northern and 
clockwise in the southern hemisphere, while the storm as a whole 
drifts with the currents of the upper air in a curving course to west- 
ward and then away from the equator. 

The hurricane of fiction is always preceded by an ominous brooding 
calm with a sky of sickly green against which palm leaves stand out 
like spikes of copper, but in reality the great storm is usually ushered 
in by gales which increase in violence until they break into a riotous 
tumult. 

The very air becomes an entit}^ a thing real as the rush of water, 
overwhelming all in its path. A roar, unearthly in its might, rises 
at intervals into wild shrieks that overwhelm one's voice. The solid 
rain drives horizontally and buildings leak more through tlieir sides 




House at Papaea, Tahiti. 

than through their roofs. The crests of waves are blown far and 
away, and the sea flattens under the crushing pressure of the storm, 
the dark waters hidden beneath a white sheet, gray swirls scudding 
gliost-like over all. The wind comes, not straight, but in fearful twist- 
ing swills and bits of seaweed strike against lighthouse windows one 
hundred and sixty feet above the sea. One stifles. The air, no longer 
a pellucid nothingness, has become an enemy against which one can 
not stand ; above which one can not shout, and, in the mighty presence 
of which, man is an ant-like thing, his smug assumption of mastery 



THE ISLANDS OF THE MID-PACIFIC 183 

over nature a ridiculous pretence. There is no protection anywhere, 
even the strongest, highest wall serves but to create a maelstrom be- 
hind it. 

The trunks of stately palms bend humbly to the onrush until they 
thrash upon the ground, or tearing loose fly upward into the vapor of 
the storm. Great trees fall, but one hears no crash; houses change in 
shape and crumble and there is no noise from them, for all sounds of 
earth are as silence in the presence of the vast voice of the air. 

Then, after hours that seem as years, as if all nature had fallen 
into war and peace could never come again, the wind unexpectedly 
ceases and the demon of the storm smiles down upon a blighted world. 
A candle flame may live in the sullen ,air, yet all around the horizon 
lies the black wall of the hurricane glistening in silver where it presses 
on the sea, and a confusion of huge waves come toppling in from all 
directions, crashing one against the other, and the barometer sinks to 
its lowest level. Afar off, one hears again the dull roar, then onward 
it comes with sudden fury, but reversed in direction, to finish the work 
of destruction it had but half accomplished. 

After air is over the sun — the long-forgotten sun — shines out upon 
a land, hideous in its ruin. The forest lies in shattered skeletons and 
dangling here and there are blackened rag-like things that once were 
leaves. The houses of the village lie shapeless, strewn among the com- 
mon wreckage of the palms where the great waves let them lie, and 
strange rocks weighing tons have risen from the sea as monuments to 
the reality of nature's awakening in a region where once she seemed but 
to dream and soothe with gentle airs and flirt with all things real.^ 

Yet tropical nature knows no mourning and laughs at death and 
ruin. New life seizes covetously the lost places of the old and in a few 
years only the trained eye of the native can detect traces of the work 
of the great hurricane. 

Once or twice in every generation each island is devastated by such 
a storm. Yet so wanton is tropic life, so heedless, listless and resigned 
to things that are, that nowhere in the South Seas have the natives 
taken the trouble to construct hurricane-proof refuge houses into 
which the village might retreat in time of need. 

1 Such, a rock is to be seen upon the reef-flat of Lottin Harbor, Kusaic 
Island in the Carolines. It is 15 feet long, 8 feet wide and 8 feet high. 



[Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 350-354, 

April, 1916.] 



JAVA, THE EXPLOITED ISLAND 

By De. ALFRED GOLDSBOROUGH MAYER 

ASUEVIVOR from an age of richer color than onr own is the 
templed hill of Borobodoer in the middle of Java. 

Here, more than a thousand years ago, the Hindu conquerors 
wrought honor to their " Mount of Buddha " by surrounding the dome- 
like reliquary at its summit with ten ornamented terraces of stone, en- 
casing the sides of the hill in an ordered symmetry of angled walls, 
and portals, and of lattice-covered statues of the Buddha, all wonder- 
ful in the vast labor of the sculptured story of their creed. 

Then, in after centuries, the sword and the Koran came from beyond 
the seas and the day of the Hindu passed, to be forgotten as only the 
East can forget a glory that has gone. Then it was that those who loved 
the old temple were forced to bury the doomed shrines beneath the 
kindly sod, and thus in oblivion they survived until the European came 
to cherish and restore. 

Secluded in the deep country far from the haunts of trade, within 
but apart from the modern world, the temple lies as if dreaming in the 
spirit of its worshipper's Nirvana; peaceful in the sunset of its days, 
while green around it lies a valley rich in rice and palms, and, high 
above, one sees the smoking summits of volcanoes hushed in slumber. 

The horde of Mahomet came and the Buddhist died in tragedy, yet 
after a thousand years the stones of Borobodoer remain as an Alhambra- 
like reminder of his culture and his pride; but Java with its thirty mil- 
lions toils on unmoved by any inspiration from its past. Nourished in 
body, yet starved in spirit, it plods through its thousand rice fields 
within sight of the temple walls. 

The garden par excellence of the tropic world is Java, yet intellec- 
tually it is but a cemetery of withered hopes and ambitions wrecked in 
mockery, for over all there broods the dull fatalism of despair — the 
" sufficient unto the day " of the conquered follower of Mahomet. 

Ambition, if it exists in the Java of to-day, seems powerless to raise 
its people above the condition of the Asiatic peasant. There is no well- 
to-do class of native artisans, and one may travel throughout the land 
and find hardly a native shop upon whose wareb the European may be- 
stow a glance of admiration, save only for the vanishing art of batick 
cloth, and the still more moribund manufacture of the Krees. 



JAVA, THE EXPLOITED ISLAND 185 

Ant-like over the whole land, in every view, there swarms the dull- 
faced, docile coolie of the soil. Measured by standards of morality, 
culture and ambition, the Javanese of to-day are negative. Their 
Mohammedanism is of an insipid type that tolerates the drinking of 
wine, permits women to go unveiled, is lax respecting the observance of 
prayer, and sanctions the representation of the human form in art pro- 
vided the figures conform to the spider-like grotesqueness of the batick 
decorations. Even a pig fattens comfortably in the back yard, destined, 
however, to be sold to the " heathen " Chinese. A cloud of abnegation, 
the despair of a beaten race, broods over the whole land, and bright 
though the sun may be and green the fertile fields, the spirit of man is 
colorless and gray, and it is difficult to realize that these crouching, 
silent forms and averted faces, expressionless as drawn parchment, are 
those of the descendants of the warriors of Mataram. 

How long will the inscrutable face of the East hold back the expres- 
sion of its hate ? One travels from one end of the land to the other and 
never a hearty laugh is heard, and the air seems heavy with bitter 
thoughts unmuttered. There are latent things in Java more to be 
dreaded than the slopes of Ivrakatoa, where, under a fair covering of 
flowers, titanic fires lie hidden. 

Granted that the only civilization is that which a race achieves for 
itself, never that which is thrust upon it, yet there is still something 
wrong here, for the present Javanese outlook upon life is narrower than 
it was in the past, and a primary cause of the continuance of the evil 
is not far to seek, for the Dutch, with all their admirable administra- 
tion of affairs, have, as yet, done little or nothing for the general edu- 
cation of the masses of Java. In the villages, one commonly looks in 
vain for the temple of any creed, and the school-house, even when pres- 
ent, leaves much to be desired. 

A few good schools for the sons of chiefs there are, and upon ele- 
mentary native education the government spent in 1913 the paltry sum 
of $1,321,000 ; and the much larger sum of $3,000,000 upon the improve- 
ment and development of agriculture; an investment upon Avhich Java 
returns a yearly interest, to mention only three commodities, of 3,100,- 
000,000 pounds of sugar, 35,650,000 pounds of coffee, and 92,000,000 
pounds of tobacco, the total of her exports amounting to fully $75,000,- 
000 per annum. There are 9,315,000 acres cultivated by the natives and ' 
the population of the island is 594 to the square mile ; yet of its 30,000,- 
000, the total native population of the five largest cities, Batavia, 
Samarang, Soerabaya, Djokjakarta, and Solo, is hardly more than 
400,000. The vast mass of the people are agriculturalists living in 
thatched huts in myriads of little villages that cluster among the 
cocoanut groves of every valley in the land; and practically the only 
occupations open to natives of Java are those connected with the culti- 
vation of the soil. 



1 86 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

This narrowness of industrial outlook has, on several occasious, been 
a source of commercial weakness, and Java has not always "paid," 
desi3ite her conquerors' efforts to secure as much profit from her as their 
conscience and the public spirit of their times would permit. 

The water supply of her countless mountain streams might turn the 
wheels of many a mill, but Java still sends her products abroad in the 
form of raw materials, and the cultivation of cotton is not even at- 
tempted. 

It is a hopeful sign that the natives themselves are beginning to plead 
for education of a broader sort that will enable the more progressive 
and intelligent peasants to escape the fate pf slaves of the soil, and it is 
probable that within a few years the Dutch government will respond 
and the prosperity and happiness of Java will be enhanced, for 
the Dutch have moved slowl}''^ but surely, in the direction of al- 
truism during their long occupation of the East Indies. They first 
appeared in 1595 under the lead of Cornelius Houtman who, after 
adventures and imprisonment, had ferreted out the secret of the route 
around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indies which the Portuguese had 
discovered under Yasco da Gama in 1497. Thus it was that the trade 
which had made the port of Lisbon the richest in Europe, now fell into 
the grasp of the Dutch East India Company, a corporation which be- 
came so powerful that it regarded itself as independent of even Hol- 
land's laws, and passed statutes adverse to the interests of its mother 
country, practically excluding Dutchmen not in the employ of the com- 
pany from occupying land in the East Indies. 

The methods employed in exploiting the natives, while more humane 
than those of the Portuguese, were still little above those of medieval 
Venice, and thus it was that, having thoroughly over-reached itself, the 
company failed in 1796 for $50,000,000. 

The natives, goaded to desperation by generations of injustice, broke 
out into insurrection, which Holland, having been overrun by the French, 
was powerless to quell. 

Then came the picturesque Bonapartist, Marshall Herman Daendels, 
who governed the island from 1808 to 1811. By force of arms he re- 
duced the power of the native chiefs to a shadow, the substance being 
maintained in European hands. The great road which he built through- 
out the entire length of Java from east to west, in the course of two 
years, is the result of his iron will, the head men of the villages being 
threatened with death unless they completed their task in time. More- 
over, it was Daendels who caused old Batavia, "the white man's grave- 
yard," to be practically abandoned as a residence by Europeans, and 
moved the capitol farther inland to a healthful site. 

Daendels sought, also, to systematize the custom of "forced crops" 
which had been the rule of the old Dutch Company, at least in places 



JAVA, THE EXPLOITED ISLAND 187 

and under various forms. About two fifths of the Land suitable for 
coffee was set apart and the natives were forced to farm it, the entire 
crop raised thereon going to the government. On the other three fifths 
of the coffee area the natives might raise their own crop, but they were 
forced to sell all to the government at a fixed price much below its 
actual value. 

This autocratic career of Daendels was, however, cut short by the 
English conquest of Java, which resulted in the able administration of 
Sir Thomas Stamford Eaffles between 1811 and 1815, wherein important 
and Lasting reforms were instituted in the direction of " fair play " .for 
the natives. Suffice it to say that with Baffles a spirit of effective altru- 
ism was manifested for the first time during European occupation of 
Java. In 1816, Java, together with many other East Indian islands* 
she had lost, was returned to Holland ; the Dutch profiting greatly by the 
results of the reforms brought about by the French and English. 

Backslidings into old schemes of exploitation there have been, how- 
ever, as when the government under Van den Bosch, which was in con- 
trol from 1830 to 1839, took from each native a fifth part of his land 
upon which he was forced to raise for the government crops of coffee, 
indigo, sugar, pepper, tea or tobacco. In addition, the natives were 
forced to pay so heavy ,a land tax upon their remaining property that 
many of them defaulted and the government thus acquired the immense 
tracts which it still holds. In twelve years $830,000,000 in taxes was 
wrung out of the down-trodden natives who, in order to escape starva- 
tion, were forced continually to clear and cultivate virgin soil; despite 
which the extortionate nature of Van den Bosch's plan was such that 
famine broke out in 1849 and nearly 500,000 victims perished. 

The conscience of Holland was at last .aroused, and the system of 
forced culture has been gradually abandoned, especially since 1870, so 
that to-day it is no longer a burden upon the natives in so far as their 
agricultural produce is concerned, although the system still dominates 
the conduct of the mining industry. 

This system, cruelly unjust as it was, had certain good effects. It 
forced upon the natives habits of industry which they retain to-day, and 
also by greatly increasing the area of cultivated land it permitted an 
enormous population to be supported in health and comfort, if not in 
luxury. In 1816, there were only about 4,500,000 natives, while to-day ■ 
there are nearly 30,000,000 in Java. 

Steady progress in liberal reforms has been manifested by the Dutch 
since 1870. The island is governed through the direct agency of seven- 
teen native regents who, however, are in each case subject to the 
"advice" of a Dutch Eesident and owe their appointment to Holland. 
In most respects, however, the natives appear to be self-governing in so 
far as their immediate affairs are concerned and, indeed, the Eegenta are 



.-^ 



1 88 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY 

permitted considerable " play " if they conform to the spirit of civiliza- 
tion and to the customs of their race. 

One thing the Dutch have done which we ourselves might well emu- 
late in our government of the Philippines^ and that has been the appoint- 
ment of commissions composed of the best-trained scholars to study and 
report upon native languages, folk-lore, customs, arts, religion and his- 
tory. Many authoritative volumes, unfortunately all in Dutch, have as 
a result been published upon these subjects and thus the officials sent out 
from Holland are already prepared to grasp the true inwardness of every 
native thought and act. 

Intending officials in the civil service of the Dutch administra- 
tion in the East Indies must pass an examination in many subjects re- 
lating to the East Indies, and must speak Malay, the official language, 
and one other native tongue before being permitted to qualify for any 
position of executive importance. The Dutch, in short, are trying to 
become the " big brothers " of the natives and a happier and more hope- 
ful relationship is year by year developing in the East Indies between 
the white master and his brown ward. 

This large-minded standpoint has been achieved slowly for, with 
many setbacks, it is the result of 300 years of association. Yet from 
this fact alone one may the more safely regard it as a final triumph of 
the right, and not as a mere transient, semi-sentimental, dip into altru- 
ism. It savors of fair play rather than of charit}^, and of mutual respect 
based not so much upon fear as upon ^mderstanding. 

Narrowly self-centered, unaltruistie, and even predator}^, the spirit 
of the Dutch government may have been in the past, but throughout it 
has been consistent in attempting to develop among the natives the habit 
of industry. 

Under many a kindlier rule native races have lost ambition and have 
withered to extinction in the vile repose of apathy. Thus in all the world 
Java is the best example illustrating the fact that given habits of indus- 
try, a race can survive the ruin of its independence, its hope, and its 
pride, and multiply despite a conqueror's exploitation of its resources. 



1 UQA^ni 



